


Wait for the Ricochet

by squire



Category: Inception (2010), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Dreams, Gen, Guilt, Redemption, Self-Sacrifice, actually very big differences from the Inception mechanics, if you think this ends well then remember how Inception ended, slight differences from the Inception mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:01:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squire/pseuds/squire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where Mind Heist is a common espionage practice and Sherlock Holmes is one of the best Extractors, the slowly growing threat of Moriarty’s syndicate did not escape the eye of the British Government. Moriarty is captured and Sherlock accepts his brother’s plea to enter the criminal’s mind in order to retrieve a computer code that could possibly endanger the national safety itself. However, Moriarty proves to be more than a match for Sherlock’s abilities, catching him in a multilayered dream and forcing him to play games with him, making him lose round after round. When Mycroft realises that Sherlock is no longer able to wake on his own, lost deep in Moriarty’s snare, he finds one John Watson, former Extractor, who left the job for good after his wife’s death. Mycroft convinces John to enter the shared dream, become Sherlock’s companion, and defeat Moriarty’s schemes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Target

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to rranne, for beta reading and for steadfast support through it. Also, I would like to thank Jay for the nice chat we've had over the first chapters.
> 
> I hope you would enjoy reading this at least as much as I enjoyed writing it. This is my last work in the BBC Sherlock verse; I shall hope the wait was worth it. Comments will be loved and cherished.

Sometimes you’re looking at something happening in front of you and all you can think is– _this is so surreal, it must be a dream_.

It must be a dream, because expensive black cars don’t pull up by the kerb just two steps ahead of ordinary looking, middle aged, family sort of men– and if so, said men wouldn’t climb in through the rear door opened for them with only as much as a moment’s hesitation – as if it was the most natural thing in the world. You would think, well, abductions in broad daylight _do_ happen, but someone has obviously abducted the wrong man here. Such cars don’t stop for such men, not even in the movies.

But as usual with scenes that happen in broad daylight, no one is watching; few people happen to be looking; there’s a difference between looking and actually seeing. John Watson has plenty of experience with that.

For a moment he, too, almost thought that they were indeed abducting the wrong man.

It was exactly this sort of attitude that made John’s former career climb skywards so quickly. From the boring haircut to the worn tips of his cheap shoes, John Watson was a personification of _ordinary_. You could stand behind him in a shop queue, waiting for him to realise that, yes, bugger, he’s left the wallet on the kitchen table; you’d miss your bus connection because of this delay but you’d be angry with the bus driver instead of the forgettable guy in the shop who was already fading into non-existence. Everyday streets were full of people like him, mistakable, indescribable, and invisible. The tube was full of these non–entities that you pushed past and left behind. Your subconscious mind was full of such Watsons; what difference was one more?

You could be happily skiving off in a pleasant dream about a weekend in Venice when at some moment a _just-like-any-other_ looking tourist could ask you to take a picture of him in front of St. Mark, fumbling with the camera settings before pressing it in your hand; and you would take that picture of his beaming smile on that lightly-tanned face – perhaps two for good measure, this man and technology clearly didn’t get on – and he would thank you and you’d already be thinking about something else, not even remotelyaware that the keys to the safebox in your hotel room are no longer in your breast pocket; and later, when you’d walk back into the room and find them laying on the nightstand, you’d convince yourself that you’d actually left them there in the morning; and when you wake, for all the love of God you wouldn’t be able to explain _how_ your business plans for the next year could have leaked out.

Even the cautious and the careful who had taken the pains to train their subconscious mind to be on guard against unwanted intruders, didn’t get a look in when it happened. Men wearing cosy jumpers and crow’s feet around their eyes simply couldn’t be any threat, could they?

That’s why it felt like one of those dreams John Watson no longer dreamt when he was led up the staircase, his shabby shoes an insult to the richness of the carpet, to be ushered into a library. Shelves full of leather-bound classics lined the walls, giving the impression that the only _read_ print around here were the newspapers, tossed carelessly on the coffee tables. Marble ceilings and hideous chairs completed the picture.

“How nice of you to come, Mr. Watson.” A tall, impeccably dressed man stood up gracefully from one of the chairs and offered John a hand with a flourish that went well with the friendly smile plastered on his face. Both signs were over–acted to a mere caricature of polite manners, adding to John’s feeling of how fishy the whole business looked. The hand felt like dead flounder and there was too much teeth in the eel-like smile.

“Please, make yourself comfortable. My name is Mycroft Holmes.”

The lovely woman who had kept John company in the car – well, if keeping company was the right word for her behaving as if John actually was invisible, which disturbed John a bit –came in with a tray of tea, setting it on the table by John’s left hand. _Someone’s been observant_ , John thought as he watched his host pouring out two cups. Then he cleared his throat.

“Are you certain you didn’t pick up the wrong guy?” he asked, faithful to his role.

“Oh, quite certain, Mr. Watson.” Holmes flashed another of his lupine smiles. “I’ve been aware of your return to London for some time; very bold of you, I must admit. But then, your ability to blend in among the ordinary has fooled people far more observant than the police, hasn’t it?”

John shrugged. Badmouthing the police – even in such a furtive way – wasn’t an uncommon tactic of his former clients in such situations; he assumed they wanted him to see which side of the law they stood on when they hired him. As if John needed such an assurance – after hiding in the plain sight for so long, he didn’t lose his nerve that quickly. You don’t invite people to private clubs for tea when you want to hand them in to Interpol, after all.

“Then you know that I’m not dealing in this anymore.”

“Yes, I know that you’ve dismissed a pretty number of contracts after that unfortunate one where your–” Holmes had enough grace not to finish that sentence when he saw the way John’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The unspoken words hung heavily in the air.

“I also know that no more contracts have been offered to you after the fiasco of last year, when you decided that the time for mourning was over and accepted the contract for Scott and Co.”

This time, Holmes didn’t mince words. Neither did Gloria Scott, when she had realised that her _investment_ had gone horribly awry. She retaliated by bringing the entire matter to light – the police promised her to raise no charges against her in exchange for her testimony. They’d do anything to catch Watson. Well, they didn’t catch him.

“Just so, Mr. Holmes,” John nodded, the sudden matter-of-factness wiping the easy smile from his face. “Why are you compromising yourself with a convicted criminal? You know I don’t do extractions anymore.”

“I wouldn’t bother one of the best men in this field with such a mundane task.” Holmes sipped on his tea as if he was discussing the standards of London tailors. “I would like you to perform an inception.”

John huffed out a soundless laugh. “You can’t pay me enough to do it.”

“Everyone has their price, Mr. Watson,” Holmes drawled. He made the universal truth sound like an opening to a fairy-tale. The first move of a pawn in a game of chess.  

“Okay, let me re-phrase.” John tossed the imaginary chess board off the table. “I’m not _that_ desperate to do it.”

Holmes smiled. “My position has certain...merits to it. What I am able to offer you cannot be bought by money. What about – a clean slate? It is within my powers to erase your record; to call off any charges you’re currently facing.”

Something in those calculating eyes told John that despite his demeanour of a stuffed peacock, this man wasn’t just pulling his leg.  

“I could even revoke the cancellation of your medical licence. You could resume your career as a GP, should you choose to stay on the side of the angels...” His voice trailed off, implying that for all his intents and purposes, Holmes would prefer John to become an illegal Extractor again.

John shifted in his seat. “Look, Mr. Holmes, there’s a _reason_ why we– why people don’t do inceptions. ‘Careful what you wish for’ – that’s what they say. It’s easy to go down there and _take_ something _out_. It’s a completely different thing to _leave_ something there.”

Holmes’ eyebrows rose as if he couldn’t believe he was being _lectured_ in his own club, but John wasn’t a man to be intimidated by a blatant showof power. He continued: “You never know what will come out of it. The human mind is tricky. Even the most basic of ideas get interpreted–”

“The idea I want you to plant is indeed the most basic one. You have to convince the target that what he believes to be true is, in fact, not.”

John stopped his tirade, taken aback by the bluntness of that statement. That sudden absence of _woulds_ and _coulds,_ as well as the turn to matter-of-fact announcement from the previous slippery talk, put him on his guard. He fell back evasive tactics.

“If your target is delusional, the best way to help him would be psychiatric treatment. I’m sure that–”

“The only way to help him is an inception.”

_Okay. I’m dealing with a nutter. Posh one, but still a nutter._ John decided to call on the practicalities. It would be better to convince Holmes that the job couldn’t be accomplished – if not _per se_ , then because of _other problems._

“I would need an Architect and no one would work with me.”

Holmes shook his head. “The participation of an Architect won’t be necessary.”

“It bloody well would.” John raised his voice a bit.  “You _know_ that I have a Shadow. I can’t be the one who’s designing the maze. My...the Shadow would use the knowledge against me.”

The Scott’s case was his mistake – he shouldn’t have taken on any job after – _after._ Everyone knew what happened to Extractors when they developed a Shadow – but he couldn’t stay out of it, not for long.

“I am well aware of this impairment,” Holmes continued with the air of a man who could arrange everything. “However, it is not relevant in this case. You see, Mr. Watson, we don’t need to create a dream. This particular dream already exists. You would only have to enter it.”

“You mean – I wouldn’t be the Dreamer?” John assured himself.

_Too risky. I can’t avoid meeting Mary; and if she wanted to do it again, I’d die for real. To die in a dream that wouldn’t be my own – no collapse and brutal awakening this time; it would be a straight drop into the Limbo, just the thing. No one maintains a comatose Extractor who lost his mind where nobody can find him._

“I’m sorry, Mr. Holmes.” John lifted his own cup and then cursed under his breath. His traitorous hand chose precisely that moment to show the intermittent tremor – a physical keepsake of his bereavement, a constant reminder that the Shadow was not his only _impairment_ – as the cup clattered against the saucer, spilling half of its contents on his hand and sleeve.  

 “ _Very_ interesting,” Holmes inclined his head, studying him like a specimen under a microscope. John lifted his chin, eyes narrowed. “So I have a stress syndrome. I’m haunted by my past. What of it?” he dared, anger ringing clear in his voice.

“Are you aware that your hand didn’t tremble at all while we’ve been discussing my offer?” Holmes asked quietly, pointedly omitting the rest: _It trembled only after you refused._

 He leaned forward in his chair, holding John’s gaze. “You’re not haunted by the Mind Heist. You _miss_ it.”

John clenched his teeth.

“Think of all you could win, Mr. Watson. And then think, carefully, of all you could _lose_.”

John looked at his hands, at the bleary London streets behind the window. He thought of his small bedsit, of the suffocating boredom of his existence, of the illegal gun at the bottom of his drawer. _Damn you, Mr. Holmes. You’ve picked up exactly the right guy._

“Who’s the target?”

***

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Sigerson?” John didn’t try to hide the awe in his voice. “You want me to plant an idea in _him_?”

They stood aside a mobile bed made in crisp white linens, in a room behind so many doors that John had lost track of their count, in a building whose location he was forbidden to ask. The level of security measures made John reconsider his perception of his employer – _posh nutter_ became _powerful nutter_. On the bed, a sleeper lay, DreamShare equipment attached to his skull along with an EEG monitor. John recognised him immediately – they had never met, but there were _rumours_.

“This is my brother, Sherlock Holmes. I see you are acquainted with one of his many assumed identities. He resorted to _aliases_ on those occasions when he felt that field research was necessary.”

“Yeah, they kept popping up every now and again. Vernet, it was him too, wasn’t it? And Hollock. Oh, I can see why that one.”

Mycroft Holmes winced.

John couldn’t tear his eyes from the contours of the dreamer’s face, sharp and riveting even in sleep. How could someone with such outstanding looks ever succeed as an Extractor? The target’s mind was never a safe playground, as the subconscious could be easily alerted by anything it perceived as alien and intruding. Sigerson – or Holmes, _better get used to his true name_ – must have been a master of disguise to pass through the guards of a trained target’s mind unnoticed. What a contrast to John’s own approach – him being just what he was, an invisible man. Sherlock Holmes was anything but invisible.

“The man is a _legend_. Brilliant theorist – I mean, everyone of us has a copy of his _Science of Extraction_ somewhere; he’s practically set the basis for what we do.”

At last it occurred to John that Mycroft Holmes probably knew better than anyone how exceptional his own brother was, so he finished rather lamely: “I didn’t think he’d be taking any jobs nowadays. I always assumed he’d be one of those who work for the Government.”

“My brother works, in fact, for me,” Holmes replied with an odd hint of self-satisfaction that John decided not to pry into.

“Well, that’s him.” John gestured to the cables and optical fibres that were connected to a panel on the wall, and from where they obviously led to another room. “Who’s on the other end of the line?”

Holmes hesitated a moment, the words _classified_ and _clearance_ hanging in the awkward silence. John folded his arms.

“If I’m to accomplish what you want me to, I’ve _got_ to know.” It wasn’t a threat, merely a fact. Mycroft Holmes bowed to the inevitable.

“James Moriarty.” Holmes began pacing the room. “Promising mathematician, won the Gauss Prize five years ago. Instead of dutifully assuming a professoriate, he left academia and public life altogether. Only recently did we realise that he has become a criminal mastermind, protecting and organising the criminal underworld in exchange for their obedience and a share of their profit.”

“A consulting criminal?” It sounded unbelievable. “Don’t tell me you’re so concerned over the levels of petty thievery, mugging, or robberies in London.”

“You won’t coax me into telling what I _would_ be concerned over,” Holmes replied in obvious amusement at John’s attempt to sneak a peek of information about his mysterious client. “Let’s say that this man got ahold of something we don’t like to see in anyone’s possession.”

“So you’ve asked Sig— pardon, your brother, to extract it for you.” So far, John was getting it. “What went wrong?”

“Sherlock is not waking,” Holmes sighed. “The usual kicks don’t work. And yet, his brain activity scans show that he’s not entered Limbo. He’s still with us, but the scans also show that he’s not merely dreaming anymore– the activity is encompassing more parts of his brain now. I suspect that he’s been trapped into the belief that his dream is real.”

Hence the inception – John understood that. He scratched the back of his head absent-mindedly. “And I thought that the Navigator was only a myth.”

“Excuse me?” The man beside him stiffened.

“The Navigator. Nobody ever knew his true name and most of us assumed he was a product of drunken imagination. God knows that some Extractors get sloshed regularly to forget what they sometimes got to see.”

“If you could stick to the facts, Mr. Watson.”

“Right.” John was surprised. Until now he couldn’t imagine his client looking impatient. “Okay. It should be a man capable of overtaking another sleeper’s dream and trapping people inside. Some swear that he’s able to pull people into a deeper layer of the dream without having to fall asleep in the first one. Everything about him is a bit of an old wives’ tale, I’d say–”

“Are you aware, Mr. Watson, that the name Moriarty means ‘navigator’ in Irish?”

_Oh shit._

A realisation dawned on John. “You didn’t know it was him.”

“I didn’t know he existed. Sherlock never mentioned him.”

_Did Sherlock know?_ John wondered. Sigerson had a reputation of being a reckless researcher–perhaps he had underestimated the myth surrounding the Navigator, or perhaps he had trusted himself enough to face him.

“How long has he been in there?” John noticed the IV lock on Sherlock’s forearm.

“Five days,” was the answer.

“Five... _days_?” John was bewildered. “Bloody hell, that can be several years in a dream! What are they doing there?”

“We don’t know.” Holmes pursed his lips as if to admit a failure was something he wasn’t quite used to doing.

“You haven’t yet sent anyone in there – to have a look, perhaps?”

“Oh yes. One or two of the _governmental_ Extractors, as you’d put it, have tried.”

“They tried and failed?” Something gave him the feeling that he really didn’t want to know the answer.

“They tried and died.”

“I’ll be completely honest with you, Mr. Watson.” Holmes dropped the adjective in such a manner that John almost began to miss his previous evasiveness. “So far, Moriarty has disposed of every intruder we’ve sent inside his and Sherlock’s dream, no matter how carefully disguised. His vigilance is exceptional. You’ve been chosen as a man who might have a chance to get past his guards unnoticed.”

“ _Might_ have?”

“I’m being honest.”

John Watson was never a man to turn down a challenge. _You’re an adrenaline junkie_ , his best friend told him when they were kids. _The bravery of a soldier_ , that’s how it was called in the Army. John was under a strong suspicion that, from Holmes’ point of view, he was simply _stupid enough_ to accept.

“Okay. What’s Sherlock’s totem?”

Holmes blinked, an odd shade fleeting across his otherwise indifferent face.

“You know, his reminder. Something to test the difference between a dream and the reality. It would be a small item, something he would–”

“I know what it is,” Holmes interrupted him. “Sadly, I have no idea what my brother’s totem might be. It is supposed to be a very personal thing, isn’t it?”

“So it is.” John looked perplexed. “But you’re his _brother_.”

“We weren’t _that_ close,” Holmes retorted, apparently horrified by the idea. John briefly wondered if he should inquire after Sherlock and Mycroft’s mother. Then he thought better of it. A woman who birthed two such men must have been a phenomenon of her own.

“He would have it with him, to test himself right after awakening,” he said instead. “Can I have a look at the contents of his pockets?”

John was presented with an assortment of various odds and ends. Sherlock Holmes must have been fond of coats with capacious pockets to stuff all of it inside. John discarded the nicotine patches and crumpled notes – too impersonal. Sherlock’s phone was an expensive Blackberry indistinguishable from the market model. A set of lock-picks definitely looked interesting, if only for its metaphorical significance – _opening the secret door of themind._ Sadly, there was no way John could guess how exactly the lock-picks would work as a totem. He turned an old pipe between his fingers; the stuff sticking to its insides definitely wasn’t tobacco ash. John knew that Sigerson experimented with drugs, was he trying to smoke crack? Pocket knife, notepad full of illegible scribbling, pencil, and keys with a magnifier glass keychain completed the list.

“Is there something your brother valued, something seemingly impractical that he couldn’t be made rid of it?”

“Aside from his skull, I cannot recall anything that my brother would be overly fond of.”

“Erm...I’m rather fond of my skull as well.” John suppressed a twitch in the corners of his mouth.

“Oh no, I didn’t mean the one that encases his brain,” Holmes explained. “It’s simply a rather odd item of accessory that usually adorns his mantelpiece.”

“ _Human_ skull?” _Why doesn’t that strike me as odd at all?_

“Yes. My brother put very little merit to social behaviour. He always preferred the company of his ‘friend’, as he likes to call it, above the company of any living person.”

John couldn’t help but laugh. “ _Alas, poor Yorick,_ ” he quoted. “That’s not very helpful. I guess I’d have to figure it out once I get there. Assuming that I’ll get close enough to him.”

“You would have to earn his trust. I have to warn you that very few people have ever achieved that.”

John put on his easiest, most affable grin: “A man who prefers to talk to a skull and whose own brother doesn’t know his totem? A poster-boy of friendliness, I’m sure.” 

 


	2. Bullet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter won't make a nick of sense if you haven't seen A Study in Pink. 
> 
> Also, thousand thanks to ArianeDeVere for her episode transcripts.

John stopped at the crossing, casting his glance swiftly to the right, then to the left–  and realised he no longer lay in the bed next to his target’s.

It always happened like this – the arrival into a dream with no actual awareness of any descent. No slow drifting off into a slumber, no growing weight on your eyelids, no chasing of scattered thoughts behind your forehead; one second you were counting down on the DreamShare program and the next you were walking the streets– that is to say, if your Architect was so kind as to provide you with a maze in a shape of a city. John used to be amazed by the aptness with which the brain adopted a new situation, wrapping itself around the forced reality and providing all the additional information that it subconsciously expected to get, extrapolating from previous experiences. He’s been in the dream only a couple of seconds now and his feet already felt as if it had walked for some time, sending short stabs of ache up his calves upon each step.  

As he continued his walk, he tried his best not to look utterly flabbergasted by the vivid and realistic nature of the dream. The London streets he trod on looked as if they had been copy-pasted from reality. The people who populated them had distinguishable faces; all of them. John was used to meeting personifications of people in his target’s mind, the more detailed and true to form the more important for the target they were; but the rest of the dreamy population were usually a number of faceless, shadowy figures in the background, or nondescript persons with a generic face, much like his own. There were exceptions, of course: once, he shared a dream with a bloke who was fond of LSD. The people he met inside his dreams reminded John of Del Toro’s horrors. It was one of the rare occasions his usual strategy failed – to blend into that dream he had too few eyes and a considerable lack of scales or wings. In Sherlock’s mind, as far as John could see, the everyday people were captured down to the very last detail, as if photographed. _Sherlock must have an eidetic memory_ , John thought, _and an admirable memory storage system too_.

_Damn, it must have taken months to build a whole fucking London out of one’s memories. No wonder he got stuck._

He roamed the city for the better part of two days in his search for Sherlock Holmes, the feeling of absurdity of such an endeavour making his shoulders sag. The man could have been anywhere. Mycroft Holmes had provided him with next to no valuable information about his brother. Then there was the fact that John couldn’t make his search any more efficient simply by asking people for help– that would be a flashing beacon announcing his presence to Moriarty’s guards. So far, John didn’t even dare to buy himself any food, knowing that the gripping pain in his stomach was only a product of his basal brain that had adopted the dream for its new reality. The hunger he felt wasn’t real and he wasn’t in any danger of perishing from it – he didn’t even expect any observable lessening of his strength during the time he would have to spend in here – what appeared like days in a dream were mere minutes in the real world.  

It took John two days to notice the oddities revealing that, despite the inhuman accuracy of it, the dream was still only a dream.

The stars didn’t move. Every night, the sky was scattered by shining pinpoints that kept their exact place above the city through all the night. The sun rose duly in the east and set in the west, and John had to laugh when he figured out the reason behind it. In Sherlock’s deeply-rooted opinion, the Sun revolved round the unmoving Earth. John wondered what kind of a man would clutter his headspace with such copious detail about total strangers he passed by on the streets, omitting the grammar school knowledge of the laws of nature. The fact that John couldn’t recognise a single constellation in the haphazard scatter of the stars above revealed that astronomy wasn’t high on Sherlock’s list of priorities either.

Then there was the beautiful music, or more precisely, snatches of it that he caught walking past restaurants. Nearly all of it was classical: concertos and violin sonatas mostly; opera, apparently, also belonged among Sherlock’s favourites. Sometimes, when passing a crowded club or a noisy, beer-reeking pub, he caught a fragment of more popular melodies, but nothing past the dreadful late nineties. Sherlock must have stopped paying attention to pop music about the time he stopped clubbing.

Not that John needed to wait for sunset or turn on a radio to make sure he was still inside Sherlock’s head. Every now and then, his hand went up to scratch the scar on the left side of his chest, just under the shoulder. It was almost an unconscious gesture, a constant reminder better than any totem could be. The scar was there only when he dreamed, a memory of the shot that had ended his career as an Extractor. The tremor in his hand lasted even in his waking hours; but only in dreams did he have a visible cause for it.

He kept one eye on the lookout for Mary at all times. London was a big city but John was sure that they would meet sooner or later. It was as inevitable as casting a shadow when the sun shone.

 _Mary would be like a spark of life in this gloomy place_ , John thought and then he stopped dead in his tracks to wonder why he had just formulated that particular thought. Then it hit him: Mary was extraordinary. Her petite frame and impish grin were a mere masquerade of her quicksilver mind and flint-hard eyes; especially when you were unfortunate enough to behold them from the wrong side of a gun sight. She was a surprise in a flowered dress, a perfectly harmless killing machine. But the things around here– the life happening on the streets, the random people he passed by, everything John witnessed– never had a single element of surprise in them. It was all amazingly precise, yes; but equally predictable. Nothing ever happened that would be out of the ordinary, people tracked the well-trodden paths of everyday life without a single aberration. Every event appeared to aim straight for the middle of the Gaussian curve of probability. This dreamy London was built using the laws of statistics, and as such, it was incredibly boring.

In the early hours of his third day spent on aimless wandering, John remembered the skull. Maybe Sherlock had a taste for the macabre, maybe it was scientific interest, but there was the probability he could be found near mortuaries. John put on his doctor role, that trusty face and the overworked bearing of a man pulling a thirty-six hour rotation, and searched through the hospitals methodically. It was the third he visited, St. Bartholomew’s, where Fortune smiled on him.

He recognised Mike Stamford as soon as he spotted him in the hospital canteen. The years had done their job on him in an expectable, waist-line-expanding way– bad habits die hard and Mike was always prone to comfort eating during stressful exams. John wondered how much this personification of his Uni mate was a result of the logical extrapolation that seemed to rule everything around here, and how much was a semblance of the real, middle-aged Mike. Sherlock must have known him in real life, that much was certain.

With a shift of his shoulders and a slight change of stance John dropped his role of a doctor. That wouldn’t do with Mike. In a flash of inspiration John grabbed a cane that someone had left forgotten by one of the tables, and putting on that enduring, angry-with-himself look of a patient in rehab, he limped towards his old friend.

In no time they embarked on some non-committal small-talk. John looked genuinely broke and was waiting for a good opportunity to ask an innocent question about Sherlock when Mike beat him to it. _Jackpot_ , John thought and agreed to go and have a look at his potential flatmate.

The Sherlock Holmes he found in the lab surprised him. For one thing, he looked several years younger than his sleeping self. His looks and overall appearance were even more blindsiding than John had imagined. The man moved with the grace of a dancer and carried the six feet of his body with an arrogance that reminded John instantly of the elder Holmes, not to mention the comparable expensiveness of their clothes. Even with his attention not directed on John, the younger man looked like an exclamation mark in the otherwise familiar laboratory, and John had to bite his lip to hold back his curiosity and just stand there, waiting for a cue.

Which happened to come as an offer to hand over his mobile phone, when Sherlock complained about the lack of signal on his own.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?”

John frowned. Without any warning he found himself treading dangerous ground.

“Sorry?” he hesitated, searching for some help, but Mike’s smug smile wasn’t helpful in the least.

“Which was it – Afghanistan or Iraq?” Sherlock’s deep voice had a bored edge to it, indicating that Sherlock was sure of an answer anyway. John decided to blindly take a pick.

“Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you know...?”

Sherlock apparently didn’t find it necessary to explain himself and plunged right into something that sounded like an arrangement of flat sharing terms. John did his best to look taken by surprise at the development. Well, the riding crop in a mortuary _did_ sound a bit alarming...

“Is that it?” he stopped Sherlock’s monologue at last, just when the impossible man was about to leave the lab. Sherlock turned back from the door and strolled closer.

“Is that what?”

John smiled in disbelief – _it couldn’t be that easy, could it?_ “We’ve only just met and we’re going to go and look at a flat? I mean – we don’t know a thing about each other.”

Pale grey eyes bore into him for a moment before Sherlock spoke.

“I know you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him – possibly because he’s an alcoholic; more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp’s psychosomatic – quite correctly, I’m afraid.”

John looked down at his cane and shuffled his feet in an attempt to hide his utter bewilderment. That moment of awkwardness saved him from another smug smirk from Sherlock Holmes, before the man disappeared at last.

 _Well, that was something_ , John thought. He could see where he gave an impression of an Army doctor – he didn’t try to conceal the fact that he studied medicine. After all, it was Mike, his former classmate, who introduced him to Sherlock. John was also quite fond of the simple haircut he got used to during his days in the Army – though he was never deployed, neither to Afghanistan nor to Iraq. The bit about the psychosomatic limp was most likely to be blamed on the cane, though John would like to hear a closer explanation of that. But how Sherlock conjured up John’s alcoholic brother remained a mystery, especially as John didn’t have a sibling in real life and had never pretended to have one in any of his mind heists.

“He’s always like that,” Mike winked and John felt a tang of excitement. _This will be interesting_.

 

***

 

“Okay, you’ve got questions.”

The cab made slow progress through the evening traffic on their way to Brixton. In the backseat, John’s head was still spinning from the whirlwind of what was supposed to be an afternoon spent looking at a flat that had resulted in an invitation to be Sherlock’s assistant for a case of four serial suicides.

 _Who are you?_ That was the most important question for John at the time. Apparently, this Sherlock Holmes was no Extractor. John was beginning to doubt if there were any mind heists done in this architecture of a dream. Whatever the Navigator wanted from Sherlock didn’t encompass his exceptional abilities, and it was possible that Moriarty hid this aspect of Sherlock’s life from him completely. “What do you do?” John asked.

   
“What do you think?”

There was a hint of pride in the younger man’s voice, so John picked his words carefully: “I’d say private detective ...but the police don’t go to private detectives.”

“I’m a consulting detective. Only one in the world. I invented the job.”

John wondered if this was what Sherlock would have become in real life had it not been for the existence of DreamShare technology. Both endeavours, Mind Heist and the detective work, were focused on discovering what was hidden, both required an equal share of brains and guts, both could bring the reward of a good hunt. John already knew Sherlock as a terrific Extractor. How good would he be as an amateur detective?

“The police don’t consult amateurs,” John remarked. Sherlock threw him a look.

“When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said, ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’ You looked surprised.”

 _Yeah, anybody would look surprised finding themselves suddenly in the middle of a geography exam._ “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation as you entered the room said trained at Bart’s, so Army doctor – obvious. Your face is tanned but no tan above the wrists. You’ve been abroad, but not sunbathing.”

John winced internally. When he was forced to leave England after the Scott fiasco with Interpol at his heels, sunbathing was the last thing on his mind, indeed.

“Your limp’s really bad when you walk but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Afghanistan or Iraq.”

John mentally chided himself for the slip of not asking for a chair. Pretending to be lame was obviously a harder thing than it seemed. The cane was a spur of the moment inspiration, supposed to help him to blend in among the hospital patients. He had never expected it to inspire such a castle in the air of deductions. Well, if Sherlock thought it psychosomatic, so much the better. John could pretend to get miraculously cured by some exciting experience which was sure to come as long as he stayed by Sherlock’s side, and then he would be done with the cane for good.

“Then there’s your brother.”

 _Yeah, I’d love to hear about him_. John shifted forward, prepared to listen carefully. If he was to have any success with winning Sherlock’s trust, he had to act according to what he was supposed to be, to what Sherlock expected of him.

“Your phone.” Sherlock extended his palm expectantly. John fished out the mobile phone he bought in a pawn shop after his return to London and gave it over to Sherlock.

“It’s expensive, only a six months old model, but you’re looking for a flatshare – you wouldn’t waste money on this. It’s a gift, then.”

Six months? John frowned. He was not exactly a technology-savvy person but even he knew that this particular model was a hot commodity more than four years ago. It gave him a rough estimate of the time shift between the dream and the real world outside, although he still had no idea what was the reason for it in the first place.

Sherlock ran his fingertips over the scratches on the phone casing. “It’s been in the same pocket as keys and coins. The man sitting next to me wouldn’t treat his one luxury item like this. Next bit’s easy.”

“The engraving.” John had to suppress a smile when he saw where this was leading. On the back of the phone was engraved: ‘Harry Watson – from Clara, xxx.’ Those words were there already when he bought the phone. He had actually picked up this particular exemplar because of them; his name was so common that he could afford to live in London under the name of Harry Watson, his phone supporting his backstory to accidental onlookers.

“Harry Watson: clearly a family member who’s given you his old phone. Now, who’s Clara? Three kisses say it’s a romantic attachment. The expense of the phone says wife, not girlfriend. Marriage in trouble then – six months on he’s just given it away. If she’d left him, he would have kept it. But no, he wanted rid of it. He left her.”

 _What a badass of a brother I have_. John smirked, careful to face the window as he did. Only the last item of Sherlock’s deduction remained unexplained, the most far-fetched of them all.

“How could you possibly know about the drinking?”

Sherlock smiled self-confidently. “Power connection: tiny little scuff marks around the edge of it. Every night he goes to plug it in to charge but his hands are shaking. You never see a drunk’s phone without them.”

 _Except for when you get a discount for it accompanied by the pawn shop owner’s apologies about his two year old daughter who stayed unguarded for twenty minutes, having obviously had a very good time with the phone and Daddy’s keys._ John didn’t mind the scratches, as long as the charger worked, and welcomed the discount. Until now, it never occurred to him that the poor state of his phone could be blamed on any different cause than a technology-loving toddler. 

Sherlock looked out the side window, biting his lip. John thought he was amazing, considering. No, it was amazing without condition – the man couldn’t have known about the actual age of the gadget, nor could he have guessed the name coincidence on the engraving.

“That ... was extraordinary; quite extraordinary,” he said with heart-felt conviction.

Sherlock turned around, surprised. “That’s not what people normally say.”

“I’d guess,” John laughed at last. “They tell you to piss off, don’t they?” 

Sherlock grinned. “Did I get anything wrong?”

John paused for a second, unsure if he should be boosting Sherlock’s ego any more or if it was safe to take just a little piss at him.

“Harry’s short for Harriet.”

The teeth-gritting self-reproach on Sherlock’s face was worth it. Considering everything John already knew about this dream and its natural relations, he was now bound to meet his lesbian sister sooner or later in flesh, brought to life as a personification of Sherlock’s deductions. He could only hope that they would get on.

 

 ***

John had seen a fair share of trouble in his life. Not so much in his days of an Army doctor – the life was always played out _outside_ the barracks – but only God and the bottom of the bottle know what an Extractor has to face sometimes. He fairly doubted that he was about to see any worse with Sherlock. A dead body cannot harm anyone, at least.

If the permanent, dull echo of pain in his left shoulder wasn’t telling him otherwise, he would believe that he hadn’t entered the dream until he stepped onto the crime scene a moment ago. Outside the doors, the quasi-real London was convicting enough to fool even the best of John’s ilk. This room with its hardwood floor, dust and dirt standing out sharply in the merciless spot lights, forced itself into one’s mind as a scene on a stage.

The body was laid out in the middle of the room and arranged artfully, legs straightened like a marionette and the nails of one hand still digging in the floor as if trying to finish the scratched message. This wasn’t a suicide note; it wasn’t even a dying woman’s last word – it was a line in a play, a cue for another actor’s appearance, entrusted in the fingers of the actress instead of on her lips, and delivered dutifully.

John wondered if he didn’t become one of the puppets the moment he knelt down beside the woman to sniff the smell of bile on her lips. If this was a puppet theatre, who was pulling the strings? Sherlock could. Since they met, John found himself following the unavoidable path of an iron filling in a magnetic field, spiraling around Sherlock like an object lifted by a storm and carried towards its eye. Sherlock was the centre of a gravitational pull, the cause and the purpose of everything in here. He could have staged a string of suicides, if only to get the opportunity to show off; he could have. But something in John doubted it. Sherlock was in the middle of this web, yes; but his  role would be that of a fly, caught and observed from above, all the threads converging on him only to keep him trapped, and his every movement being registered by the sensitive limbs of the spider waiting in the shadows, near and yet invisible. John thought of the Navigator and prayed that his presence didn’t pluck at the spider’s web enough to draw attention.

On the outside, he kept his suspicions to himself as he watched Sherlock examine the body: flipping his magnifying glass here and there, carding his fingers through the victim’s clothing, poking at her jewelry. Such enthusiasm, completely inappropriate and oddly fascinating, simply couldn’t be put on. Sherlock didn’t question this would-be-suicide presented to him like a delicious meal on a silver platter. He just dived into the investigation, the gears of his clockwork mind spinning at such rate that his whole body was thrumming.

When he took off so abruptly that it reminded John of a genie being called back to the lamp, nobody seemed too surprised. Maybe this was a part of their roles as well; to back-vocal Sherlock’s dazzling solo. If the Navigator was the listener, how far from them was he actually?

“He doesn’t have friends,” a sour-faced Constable told him, holding the police tape up for John on his way out. Her tone was a bit concerned, her shrewd eyes assessing John as if she was pondering the odds of him being the next victim of a mysterious crime.

“None at all?” he asked, leaning heavily on his cane even as he stood. He did learn his lesson with the asking for a chair, after all. The young Constable eyed him pityingly.

“You know, sometimes people would show up and ask for him, claiming to be his friends. We never see them again.” _That would be the ones before me, those who tried and failed._ He graced her well-meant parting words ‘Stay away from Sherlock Holmes’ with a dumbfounded expression and set out to limp towards the Brixton main road.

Ten minutes and three corners later he was sure that the CCTV cameras were following him.

John cursed under his breath. It could mean only one thing: Sherlock’s subconscious was becoming aware of John’s intruding nature. He forced himself to stay calm. Any outburst of action would alert the brain security mechanism even further. Sometimes he only had to stay low and all the alarm would fade out on itself.

That’s why he was relieved, of all things, when he was abducted into another dream-like experience of this eventful evening, this time a complete _deja vu_ – minus the tea and plus an umbrella. John snickered to himself as he was brought before the personification of Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock’s mind – the entire attitude of this mental image speaking of sibling rivalry at its finest.

“You don’t seem very frightened.” The rise of Holmes’ eyebrows indicated that he’d expected better impact of the scenic atmosphere he’d set out with such care.  

“You don’t seem very frightening,” John told him, relishing in the opportunity to take out on him a small revenge for some of the real Mycroft’s attempts to intimidate him. This picture of Mycroft painted by Sherlock’s memories would be to no ends chuffed to know that John was already working for him. It made the rebuff of Mycroft’s offer to spy even more satisfying.

When John finally arrived back at 221B Baker Street, he told Sherlock that he’s met his self-proclaimed archenemy.

“By the way, people don’t _have_ archenemies. In real life. Normal people have brothers and sisters.”

“Says the man who won’t go to her sister’s for accommodation,” Sherlock retorted, but he failed to hide a hint of impression in his voice. “How did you know he was my brother? He’s a spitting image of our father, he looks nothing like me.”

“Height, accent, mannerism.” John enjoyed the scowl on the detective’s face upon hearing the last item. “Besides, who else would want to mess with your life at a daily basis if not an over-protective elder brother?”

Sherlock smirked and then he all but pressed him to join the further investigation of his case. It was still a long way toward the trust but John was sure he already managed to win the younger man’s interest.

Meeting Angelo was very interesting. The restaurant owner stated that Sherlock had done him a favour three years ago, _using his detective skills already_. How long was Sherlock acting as a detective? How long was he dreaming this dream? John knew that in a dream, time didn’t have to be linear.

Then Sherlock noticed a cab slowing down to fall into their trap and every sense of time John had lost its linearity between one heartbeat and the next. One moment, they were summing each other up over the silly candle; the next, they were racing up the stairs and down the fire escapes, leaping across the gaps between buildings and running through the alleyways.

Somewhere in the middle of this madness, John thought he caught a glimpse of Mary. She stood in front of a restaurant; perhaps waiting for a cab, arms folded against the night’s chill in her white silk dress, hair done in a becoming fashion. She appeared lost in thoughts, smiling to herself.

“This way!” Sherlock shouted and John sped forwards, catching up with him.  

John started to worry at the amount of attention they were attracting. Any other Extractor would never get away with such ruthless behaviour, showing people aside and dodging cars, the angry sound of horns following them. It seemed that Sherlock was allowed a lot in this dream. Once again, John got the impression that the chase was staged by someone who enjoyed watching Sherlock run. _Why would the Navigator do such things?_

Pushing his worries aside, John realised that he enjoyed running with Sherlock. Yes, it was only a dream, such a dream where you always find sure footing and never miscalculate the length of a jump, such a dream where you can almost fly – but it still was the most hilarious thing that happened to him in months.

Sherlock seemed to think the same.

The not-exactly drug squad in their flat though, apparently, was thinking the exact opposite.

John half-expected the police to show up sooner or later – after all, Sherlock’s first clue turned up to be a flop, he needed new data to feed the consuming flames of his mind, stirred by the mystery. This was Sherlock’s play, the screenplay didn’t account for a side-kick. John sat himself in a corner, his back to the door, and pretended to google up some information about the victim. He listened and watched, every nerve ending tickling with anticipation. The case was drawing to a close, gaining speed like an avalanche. If the Navigator had any taste for drama, and John suspected that this was the case, he wouldn’t miss a chance to appear in the last scene. Whatever was about to happen, it would happen soon.  

The faint _ping_ of a text alert on Sherlock’s phone was so soft that almost everyone missed it.

John’s back was to the door. He didn’t see the man coming up, yet he _knew_ there was someone; his instincts of an Extractor all but screamed about the presence of someone _real_.

Something has changed. John was so attuned to the rules of this dream that he instantly felt the change in the pattern. The Navigator no longer wanted to watch. He wanted to play.

When Sherlock left, following the shadowy figure on the stairs like a moth fascinated by a flame, John had to use all his willpower not to get up and go after him. He knew that Sherlock was the target but he couldn’t show his hand yet. He couldn’t stop Sherlock with the coppers still around – some of them could be armed and the Navigator could have them shoot John on the spot.

He had to wait for the last one of them to leave before he collected his gun and set out, hoping to get to Sherlock in time. The tracking software in the victim’s phone showed him the place where the murderer intended to strike next. As fast as he could he made his way to the Roland-KerrCollege.

Two identical buildings. John mentally tipped his hat to the finesse of the Architect of this dream. This was a maze within a maze.

Room after room, nothing. He ran down the corridors, calling Sherlock’s name. He hoped there still was time – there had to be. He couldn’t rely on the assumption that it still was Sherlock dreaming – the Navigator could take over any moment.

When he spotted them, Sherlock and a shabby-looking cabbie, a cry of horror escaped John’s lips. They were in the identical classrooms, each in one half of the mirror symmetry the buildings were forming. Two windows and an expanse of yard separated them. He could see the cabbies lips moving as he talked, as he wormed his poisonous thoughts inside of Sherlock’s head; he could see the tall idiot moving the pill towards his mouth with a trembling hand.

John’s hand didn’t tremble when he aimed his gun and fired.

He hoped he’d shot to kill. But the distance, and the double glass reflection, was too much.

John couldn’t hear what Sherlock was yelling at the dying man, taunting him under his foot. He couldn’t see how the man’s bleary eyes suddenly darkened, their colour changeable as an oil spill on the asphalt, when the Navigator realised how little time he had before he would die and Sherlock would be released.

But John could feel the pull when the time stopped, when everything slanted and shifted. He looked up from the window. The stars above began to rearrange.  


	3. Countdown

The bluish lights of the police cars were slowly rotating in random directions before John’s eyes. Never before had he dropped a dream level without falling asleep first. The abrupt change in his cerebral activity was sending his head spinning. He felt he was going to be sick if he moved too harshly. 

A couple of coppers exited the building, carrying a body bag. John retreated deeper into the shadows cast by the cars parked behind the police tape. He didn’t want to look. The body of the cabbie wouldn’t be anything more than an empty shell, created by the Navigator in the split second he’d fled into a new dream and pulled them along with him. John forced his head to focus on a calculation of time. He was pretty sure that the Navigator was dying – that’s why he designed this new level for them, to buy himself time and a new shape for his play with Sherlock. The cabbie in the original dream would probably bleed out within minutes. In the deeper dream, it could be days but the Navigator would be bound to strike sooner this time. 

“Are you all right?” The tall detective emerged suddenly from behind John, looming over him. John startled and then he giggled helplessly, the shock and the frustration getting the better of his usual calmness. Dramatic Belstaff coats shouldn’t be worn with an orange shock blanket wrapped around them, _really._ Sherlock regarded him a bit warily. 

“Sorry. No. I’m not all right.” John knew he should be trying to look serious and convincing. But how could he, with all the blinking lights still floating, his own hands shaking, and the man whose life he’d just saved looking at him with the strangest mix of soft admiration and sharp curiosity in his eyes– 

“And you aren’t either,” John blurted out. “Don’t you see? Can’t you _feel_ it?” 

Despite the blanket around his shoulders, Sherlock wasn’t visibly distressed. _How was it possible that he didn’t feel the same?_ Then John remembered how Sherlock practically danced upon the mere prospect of suicide investigation. A few moments ago, he caught a serial killer, nearly becoming his fifth victim in the process – the endorphin and adrenaline rush from a case solved could cover for the chemical imbalance caused by the drop very well. 

One corner of Sherlock’s mouth quirked up. “I’m no wilting flower, John. Violent deaths don’t alarm me.” 

“Oh, you...” John ran his fingers through his hair. This made no sense without knowing Sherlock’s totem, but he still had to try. 

“It wasn’t real.” His right hand came up to his shoulder involuntarily, feeling the scar under his jacket. Sherlock’s eyes narrowed at the motion. “It still isn’t real. Sherlock, this is a dream. I know it sounds–” 

“You’re in shock.” Suddenly, John found himself enveloped in a cocoon of orange blanket that Sherlock threw over him as he drew him into an awkward embrace. “Coping mechanism through denial – your PTSD kicked in. It’s a natural reaction given the fact that you’re just killed a man, though I must admit I’m a bit disappointed.” 

“Uhm, Sherlock?” John huffed, his voice muffled by the fabric of Sherlock’s coat. 

“You’re in need of comforting and I’ve been told that this is an appropriate method of delivering it,” Sherlock informed him. 

“Jesus, Sherlock.” John pushed him a fraction away, creating a much needed space for drawing a long breath. “Thanks, really, but I’m not in shock, and you can’t hug me like a teddy bear on the bloody crime scene. People will talk.” 

“People do little else,” Sherlock smirked. John extricated himself from the blanket and folded it neatly, not so much out of the habit as because he needed something to do with his hands. The opportunity to making Sherlock aware of his dream was clearly gone in the wind. He cleared his throat. 

“So...disappointed? That I didn’t kill a man for you in cold blood?” 

“You _did_ kill him,” Sherlock all but purred with delight. “It surprised me. Any normal people would call police. That would be the expected course of action.” 

“They would be late,” John pointed out. Sherlock nodded. 

“Exactly. With any normal flatmate, I would be dead by now.” John imagined that this was as close to _thank you_ as he was ever going to hear from Sherlock Holmes. 

“So, if you survived without me turning up homicidal, you would have me looking for a new flat by the end of the month,” John remarked a bit wryly. “Are murderers the only thing that interests you?” 

They turned their backs to the fateful buildings and started to walk slowly down the street, ignoring the calls of the police officer in charge. Sherlock gestured vividly, his eyes shining. 

“They _are_! Crime is– a deviation. It’s something out of the ordinary. Normal people are _dull_.” 

 _Oh. So Sherlock saw it. He saw how maddeningly average and predictable this world was but he failed to interpret it correctly._ John seized what could be his only chance. 

“Have it ever occurred to you _why_? Normal life shouldn’t be dull, it should be unpredictable, changeable, ever exciting – can’t you see what’s wrong with it? With you?” 

Beside him, Sherlock fell silent. John quickly looked up. The face of his new friend was suddenly stiff and impassive, eyes cold and aloof. It was as if Sherlock drew a veil of self-protection over his features, wiping off the genuineness of his smile, hiding it like a treasure he didn’t share very often. _Hello, Freak_ , John remembered how the sour constable back in Brixton greeted Sherlock and he bit on his tongue sharply, berating himself for such ill-considered words. 

_He’s a genius. He must have sometimes found the life boring even when he wasn’t dreaming._

“Sorry. I didn’t mean–” 

“It’s hardly my fault when the world seems unpredictable to such placid mind as yours,” Sherlock clipped the words. 

John mustered the courage to look mildly offended: “Look, I _am_ sorry.” 

“Well, I am _not_ ,” Sherlock glared but John could see the ice cracking. They continued the walk in silence. 

After a while, Sherlock shot John a sidelong glance. “Dinner?” 

John released a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Starving.”

 

***

 

Next morning John woke to a fridge devoid of anything passable as food. Well, there was a head. However, John had no intention of turning into a cannibal, so he set out to do the shopping, because _that’s what flatmates do_. Feeling marginally better with a cartoon of milk and eggs in the grocery bag under his arm, he stepped out of Tesco’s and ran right into Mary. 

She looked exactly as she did the first day they met. Tracksuit bottoms, dark blue racerback top, softshell windcheater unzipped to let the morning air cool her skin as it flushed from the jogging. She smiled at him, gave him an affectionate peck on the cheek, refastened the loose strand of blond hair that had strayed from her queue, and suggested a coffee. 

It took John a while to realise that she was acting the steady girlfriend, and that she was enjoying the role. 

She chatted lively in that funny accent reminding John that she was India born and bred, her father having a ‘round the globe sort of job’. She never talked much about his father or her family; John gathered the impression that at some point, her father just walked away from them. He never assumed that Mary’s mother was actually dead but when Mary insisted on a quiet, ‘just-the-two-of-us-and-the-witnesses’ sort of wedding, he understood that he might never meet his mother-in-law. His own parents were dead by that time so it wasn’t like he needed Mary’s to reciprocate. 

They were a good match. Mary was a slender, five foot-six blonde girl with eyes of such light shade of brown that they reminded him of champagne, sparkling and attractive. She was the one who has taken the initiative from the start. Later she told him that it were his unassuming looks that drew her attention, combined with his taste for danger. _I can tell a tiger when I smell him_ , she told him at their first proper date, after she emptied the barrel of her gun into the target on the shooting range. She was a damn fine shot. _There are still tigers in India, man–eaters. My father used to hunt them._  

She said that he was born for the job. _You’re a little tiger, aren’t you, John?_  

Well, that was then. Now it was– 

“Back in the business, John? I thought you’d never pluck up the courage again.” 

“I missed you,” he said, then realised that it was true. She could see the widening of his eyes and laughed; a soft, crystal-clear, perfectly calculated sound. 

“Me? Or my rifle?” 

John grabbed his own wrist under the table to prevent his hand from going up and touching his shoulder. “I could use a nice back-up these days,” he said instead, only half-joking. Okay, more than three-quarters serious. 

“I’d say,” she nodded slowly, taking her time about blowing on her coffee and adding  sugar into it, moving the spoon in slow motion. John watched the white crystals soaking and going under the dark brown surface, melting like miniature ice-bergs. 

“Mary...” 

“Ssshhh. I know.” _I’m in your head, after all._ “This one is different. I can feel it too. Kinda like this dream. It feels like it really could never end.” Her eyes were alight with the idea and she put a reassuring hand on John’s arm, _the bad one_ , and it surprised him that he managed not to flinch. 

“Seems we have time in spades. Why couldn’t we enjoy it?” 

He watched her nip at the cookie. “After all, it’s the only time I get to see you.” 

 _Perhaps that’s the one true reason why I accepted this contract. I wanted to see you again._   

They parted in front of the cafeteria. Mary watched him disappear in the crowd, humming to herself. Then she replaced her earplugs and jogged away in the direction of Regent’s Park.

 

***

 

Sneaky hands adjusted the earpiece in his ear and tucked the excess length of the white twisted cable under the collar of the parka. John couldn’t help a shiver at the skin-to-skin contact. The vivid tactile memory of a spider that once decided to take a walk on his head while John slept sprung forth in his mind; he nearly jumped. 

“Hold still, Johnny.” The strange dichotomy of his auditory signals confused him for a second – the crackling but clear voice transmitted by the earpiece collided with the live whisper of the same voice in the other ear, breath and mint smell ghosting over his skin and leaving his hair stand on end. 

“We don’t want to spoil our game, do we?”

 

* 

 

The game began with five Greenwich pips and a gas leak. John had hardly time to put away the groceries, studiously avoiding the glass shards on the floor, before he was swept along with the investigation as if it was the most natural thing to do. Perhaps it was; now when he became another pebble on the sea shore of this dream and all that was left for him was to rise and fall with the tide that was Sherlock Holmes.  

And what a merciless force of nature that tidal wave could be. 

At first, John almost suspected that Sherlock was, in fact, aware that they were dreaming. The bomber made his threats through live targets, strapping Semtex to people and using them for the countdown, but Sherlock didn’t seem affected, let alone moved by that. He didn’t ask himself to whom belonged the shaky voices that spoke to him through the pink phone, he didn’t bother thinking about why the voices shook, he clicked his tongue impatiently when their messages were interrupted by them swallowing their tears. _As if he knew that the people weren’t real_ , John mused before he realised that this was just Sherlock being Sherlock. 

“Will caring about them help save them? No? Then I’ll continue not to make that mistake.” 

 _A man with no friends_. _Makes one wonder why_. 

If John had been really honest with himself he’d have to admit that should he ever find himself kidnapped and held hostage by a madman, he’d want to have the ruthless, uncaring Sherlock go after him, instead of the considerate, sensitive, and probably completely useless police.

 

*

 

“It won’t make any difference, for him. That it’s me. No difference at all.” John let his words emerge casual, bit on the tired side. They faded out on the tiles of the showers, thinned down by the sharp smell of chlorine and disinfectant. 

The other man giggled; a shrill, high-pitched sound. 

“I know, Johnny, I know _that_ so well. He’s too good a player to be distracted by such a little detail as his current flatmate in mortal danger, nah. I happen to know him way better than you, don’t you see? We’ve been having such a good time together before you showed up. Don’t worry, he won’t give a damn about you.” 

The black, oily eyes narrowed at him. 

“You see, _I will._ You’re a nuisance, little Johnny-boy. I’ll give you that. But no matter; you won’t be that for long.”

 

*

 

The lab at Bart’s hummed around them with the low buzz of the computer fans and fluorescent tubes. Sherlock kept on muttering under his breath while he examined the traces of mud on the trainers and John fiddled around, trying to be useful and failing miserably. 

The door hinges squeaked as if determined to wake the dead in the morgue two floors below; Sherlock’s shoulders twitched in annoyance. 

“Oh. Sorry.” John looked up sharply to find Mary already two steps into the lab, an apologetic smile on her pretty face. His first impulse – to hide her from Sherlock’s view and his deadly-acute deductions – dissipated before he even started to move. _She doesn’t want to kill me this time. So, why couldn’t I have a girlfriend after all?_ She came over to him, leaning in for a quick peck on the lips, and John sneaked a possessive arm around her to rest his hand on the small of her back. He could practically hear Sherlock’s eyes roll behind the microscope. 

“I know you said you might be late for our dinner...” She ran her glance pointedly over his every-day jacket and slightly crumpled shirt which was in sharp contrast to her evening outfit. “So I cancelled the reservation and decided on surprising you here. How I am?” 

“Generous and perfect and very, very lovely,” John complimented her. The eye-roll from Sherlock got louder. “Hey, Sherlock, this is Mary, my–” 

“On and off relationship, now obviously in the ‘on’ phase. Lovely to meet you,” Sherlock fired out dismissively. Mary’s mouth quirked upward at the corners. John wished briefly that this was the kind of dream where you can stare a hole through one’s skull. 

“Could be called like that,” she whispered to John with a wink. Aloud, she continued: “So you’re the fascinating flatmate.” 

Sherlock didn’t seem to grace that with a reaction but Mary, once set on being amiable, couldn’t be deterred so easily. 

“Never been to such high-tech lab before. Wow. I wouldn’t even get in the hospital but there I go all lucky tonight–” She gestured to the door as John remembered they _didn’t_ squeak when they shut– 

“–I met this nice boy right near the employee’s entrance, stealing a moment for a cigarette, and when I explained that I really needed to see my date, he agreed to smuggle me in.” 

John, his eyes still on Mary, more sensing than seeing the figure of a young man standing awkwardly behind the half-open door as if being too shy to come in, felt the air stolen from his lungs.

 


	4. Drowning

The straps of the bomb were cutting in his ribs uncomfortably, leaving him hardly space to draw a proper breath. The short man in a Westwood suit circled him again, admiring his work. 

“Zip up,” he ordered. “Wouldn’t want to rob him of his moment of surprise.” The grin on the man’s face was gleeful and almost childish, like a boy eager to unwrap his birthday present. 

“Imagine that, Johnny. The moment he sees you he’ll think that you’re _me_.” 

“Just because you stole his memories doesn’t mean he couldn’t know the difference once he saw you. _I_ could feel you.” 

John shouldn’t be saying those things so boldly, not in the presence of the masked men with a light finger on the trigger, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the Navigator would kill him right there. He needed John, if only for a while. 

“I could feel who you were the moment you stepped into the room.” 

The Navigator laughed, delightfully and beast-like. “That’s why you’re a nuisance, Johnny. And, by the way, the _sensation_ goes both ways.”

 

***

 

“I–I’m sorry, shouldn’t be interrupting–” the young man stammered, gentle and just-so-slightly overdone accent to his voice strangely at odds with his intensive, hungry eyes. 

“I’m Jim, from IT upstairs.” He walked closer to Sherlock, eyes locked admiringly on the detective’s back, seemingly oblivious to the way his move all but forced John to step out of his way. 

“I heard that you’d be here working on a case.” Jim’s attempts at conversation trailed off as he wasn’t getting any encouragement from the object of his curiosity. Sherlock didn’t even tear his gaze from the computer screen. Jim stopped awkwardly near the table, then, as if deciding to throw the towel in, he turned to say something trivial to Mary and John– only to knock a metal dish off the edge of the table. It clattered loudly on the tiled floor and Sherlock nearly jumped with irritation. 

“You can save your number for yourself. I’m not interested,” he lifted his head to bark out and then he focused on his experiment again, completely ignoring the way Jim blushed and Mary pressed her hand to her mouth to muffle a giggle. 

Without any more ado, Jim put back the dish, pocketing the card he was hiding in his palm before, and beat a hasty retreat. With a hand on the door handle, he stooped to cast one last longing look towards Sherlock Holmes. 

“So, um...it was nice to meet you.” Then his eyes skimmed over to John, fixing him for the briefest moment with an unreadable stare. 

“And you too, John.” The smile accompanying those words was a little shy but the eyes were of the blackest, oily colour, reflecting more light than there was in the lab. “See you.” 

Leaving the challenge hanging in the air, he closed the door behind him. John swallowed, hoping that no-one noticed how his normal colour made only slowly its way back in his face. 

Mary remarked: “Well, it seems he’s had his own motives to smuggle me in – maybe he just wanted an excuse to get in here himself?” She winked meaningfully in Sherlock’s general direction. John briefly wondered if one’s shoulder blades could look disgusted – Sherlock’s body language could speak volumes. 

 

***

 

“Carl Powers.” 

John looked up sharply to find Sherlock staring unseeingly ahead of himself, mouth slightly open. 

John got up from the chair he had been occupying since Mary left the lab – some time ago. She was a bit disappointed at John for not joining in on her plans for the evening. He rolled his shoulders in an attempt to shake off the stiffness brought by long hours spent in waiting for Sherlock. The inner numbness left by his encounter with the Navigator still slowed him down, clothing everything he perceived with a thin veil of fear. It reminded him of the kind of dreams occurring in the early stages of sleep; when the body was still too connected to the mind, where you wanted to run but your limbs would move slowly and heavy through the air thick as molten lead, where you’d be dragging your feet behind you like wounded comrades from a lost battle. 

Mary didn’t understand. She couldn’t feel the Navigator the way John did, she didn’t recognise any threat in the shy and awkward young man from IT. However, she could tell that John wasn’t all right, and she didn’t press him for an explanation. John didn’t want to share his fears with her anyway – regardless of how nice her girlfriend roleplay was, she was still another dangerous element in this game and John already felt outgunned and cornered. 

John walked up behind the revelation-struck detective and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. 

“What is it?” 

“Carl Powers, John.” Sherlock snapped into awareness. “It’s where I began.”

 

***

 

“This is where you began? This is the pool where you killed the Powers boy?” 

John could see it now. The pool and the cold murder were the bifurcation point of Sherlock and Moriarty’s lives. At one point in the past, Sherlock must have stumbled upon the Carl Powers case, his path of destiny almost colliding with Moriarty’s. In reality, he never pursued it – but the memory remained and the Navigator chose it as a starting point of his alternative reality. 

Black and changeable eyes gleamed in amusement. “Oh, I see our dear Sherlock schooled you all right. Yes, quite a nice rounding off here, isn’t it?” 

John’s tongue stuck dry in his mouth from all the talking and the chlorine-damp silence of the pool, the silence of the stage waiting for the appearance of the last actor, was getting on his nerves even more. 

“You used your past crimes to play wi–” 

“Tsk tsk,” Jim interrupted him, pulling an annoyed face. “Don’t get dainty, Johnny. Crime is pedestrian. I am an artist.” 

“But all those – coups –” John rephrased carefully, “were your own. Real ones. I remember the Vermeer. It was sold for thirty million quid.” 

“Very good, Johnny. You could almost make a detective,” Jim teased him. “Yes, that one paid off magnificently. No-one ever missed the wretched security guy and no-one ever made the connection.” 

“You wanted to see if Sherlock would be able to solve it? That’s why you replayed for him your – what? Masterpieces?” 

Jim moved around him as if dancing to a tune only he could hear, the rustle of his Westwood suit and the soft squeaking of his bright polished shoes impossibly loud in John’s earpiece. The floor tiles, still wet from cleaning, made for slippery ground but Jim didn’t seem to mind. _It’s his scenario_ , John knew instinctively, _he’s designing and propelling this dream, and he cannot slip. If he had to cross a road walking on a rope, he would do it running. This world bows to him and to his rules._  

“Why all this?” John pressed on. “This fucking smoke and mirrors London, _years_ of it! You blocked his memories from him, you manipulated his totem so he wouldn’t know dream from reality, all that for what? To play with him?” 

Jim grinned, shrugged, and shuffled his feet, hands tucked casually in the pockets – slipping back into the personality of the IT boy, easy and affable. John wondered how many layers were there to the Navigator, how many appearances he could forge, and what would he look like if his true colours were to show. _Maybe he doesn’t have any. Maybe the only thing that’s beneath all those roles is darkness, a black, bottomless abyss full of madness._  

“I was bored, okay? It’s getting lonely when you’re the only one on the top.”

 

***

 

“We’ve only had four. Where’s the fifth pip?” 

 _It has to come any moment_ , John didn’t say aloud. He knew that the game had to culminate soon – the cabbie in the first dream wouldn’t be bleeding much longer. They have two days, maybe three, left. Enough for another puzzle to solve, another countdown, and then they will get to see Moriarty in person. _Frailty of genius._ John counted on that. 

“Promise me you won’t rush off alone when it comes.” 

Sherlock snorted derisively. “Really, John? You’re my flatmate, not my bodyguard.” 

John folded his arms around his resolve not to lash out on that infuriating idiot right there. “So far, I’ve been your keeper, errand boy, cleaning service and God knows what else you’ve made me do, so when I actually want to do something for you, you better let me.” 

Sherlock ducked his head deeper in the upturned collar of his coat and said nothing. 

“I mean it, Sherlock. That man’s a fucking bomber. We’ve been in it together from the start, and even when I don’t buy your shit about how you _need an outside perspective_ , you could at least acknowledge that you need a back-up.” 

John checked the battery level on his phone and tapped his jacket pockets to make sure the gloves were there. It was freezing outside. Sherlock’s head shot back up – it reminded John of the abrupt movement of an ostrich, alerted while sitting on eggs – the analogy between the long-necked bird and Sherlock, all curled up in a coat-ball in the chair, made John chuckle. 

“You’re going out?” 

John chuckled louder. “I told you twice this evening, so maybe third time is the charm: I’m going to Mary’s. This flat is bloody cold – I wonder when they’ll come to fix the windows, it’s been several days since the first bomb. If anything happens, text me.” 

“Hmmm,” came the noncommittal reply. Just as John was about to close the door, Sherlock called out: “And get some milk, while you’re out.”

 

John was still smiling to himself when he walked down the front door steps and nearly ran into Mary again. 

“Sorry. I never know when you show up.” 

She put her arm through his. “You look a bit tense. Could we take a little walk, to clear your head? Let go of things?” She rested her head on his shoulder as they walked, leaning onto him slightly. _Perfect height for this_ , John thought. _She was perfect for me in every way._  

“Look at the stars.” Mary nudged his face up. “They’re so bright tonight.” 

“It’s because of the frost,” John answered mechanically. Above their heads, the stars sparkled and twinkled, outlining the shapes of constellations John used to know by heart – a definite proof that the Navigator took the dream from Sherlock when they dropped on this level. 

They stopped for a while in the middle of a bridge in Regent’s Park, facing south. 

“There’s a whole story written in the constellation,” he pointed at the shining spots close to the horizon. _Vela, Puppis, Carina_ – sails, keel and stern, all of it was once one big constellation, the ship of _Argo._ Ancient Greek legend.” 

Mary pressed her cheek to his in order to better follow the direction he was pointing at. John smirked and pulled her closer. 

“The sailors of _Argo_ set out on a journey to reclaim the Golden Fleece. One day, they encountered the _Symplegades_ , the Clashing Rocks. They sort of floated in the waters and clashed randomly, bringing disaster to any ship that would try to sail between them. The _Argonauts_ let a dove–” John pointed a little higher on the sky, where the _Columba_ spread her wings– “fly between the rocks, and when she made it, they went after her and made it too. After that, the rocks stopped moving permanently.” 

“What a shame,” Mary whispered in the soft skin under John’s jaw, the tip of her nose cold. “I know about _floating_.” 

John drew in a sharp breath, the freezing air stinging in his lungs. Mary’s mind, lost and unreachable after she was killed during what should be just a routine job, and her body, _floating_ between life and death, on a life-support machine and the decision was John’s to make... 

“And I know about _clashing,_ ” he murmured into her lips and she pressed her palm against the scar under his shoulder, unerringly even for all the layers of clothing, to remind him that no kiss of theirs would ever be real.

 

***

 

“Where is Mary?” His words sounded slurred to his own ears, registering with difficulty over the insistent ringing in his head. The light was stabbing pain behind his eye-sockets and he had to blink several times before the two identical men in front of him shifted properly into one. He tried to lift his hand to check his head for wounds – the skin above his left ear felt like on fire – to realise that his hands were tied. 

“The girl I was with.” John swallowed and tried again. “Where is she?” 

The last thing he remembered after an unexpected blow to his head sent him reeling to the park lane ground was Mary’s screaming. Technically, John knew that Mary was just a personification of his own guilt brought by the real Mary’s death. She was his Shadow, she couldn’t die anymore. She was like the other twin-rock of _Symplegades_ to him, sometimes far away, sometimes nearer, but every now and then clashing onto him, inevitable like a fate. 

So, he shouldn’t get really worried about her. Only he did. And besides... there was a slight chance that his abductor knew nothing about her true nature. It would look suspicious, _not_ to ask after her. 

“That little tart you’ve been wasting yourself with?” 

Jim, the IT boy, the big-eyed boyish flirt, shook his head at him with mock disappointment. 

“ _Really,_ Johnny. Do you always date during contracts?” 

 _He doesn’t know. He thinks that Mary’s just another random girl on the streets, captured to perfection in Sherlock’s memories. Or maybe one of my former girlfriends. But no-one really significant. Nobody with such a power over me..._  

“What did you do with her?” 

“ _Me?_ Nothing.” Jim spread his arms, palms up, the gesture of a conjuror that assures he’s got nothing to hide. “She ran away, screaming like she was paid for it. Presumably to fetch the police. _Boring._ ” 

John looked around him, wincing at the headache the movement caused him. He sat on a chair in the middle of what must have been a changing room, two rows of lockers lining the tiled walls, the smell of chlorine coming with a wet draught through the crack under the door. On a nearby bench, a small assortment of things lay ordered neatly and displayed with an obvious pride: orange bricks of Semtex, the smell of bitter almonds stark even against the omnipresent chlorine background, wires, detonators, straps. 

 _Oh shit. Of course the bastard wouldn’t text me when the last pip arrived._  

The Navigator moved closer, drawing John’s attention back to him. “Don’t worry Johnny-boy; I don’t like my hands getting dirty. She doesn’t matter, _you do_.”

 

***

 

“I bet you never saw this coming.” 

For a split-second, John thought he’d won and this dreadful game was over. For the tiniest amount of time, the look on Sherlock’s face was one of a man who just awoke from a dream. The shock of having one’s world suddenly turned upside down – _the bewilderment and despair of beholding a man whom he believed to be his friend_ – that could be the Navigator’s biggest mistake. 

John knew that look from the other side – he knew it the way the fish knows the shape of waves on the water surface; from below. It was the look of a target who was _about_ to wake. 

He watched Sherlock’s hand slide into his pocket, an almost unconscious move, he could watch the outline of the long fingers moving beneath the fabric, rummaging through the things in there, as Sherlock continued to walk past him, scanning the pool for some explanation. _So he was right. The totem would be something Sherlock carried around and now, guided either by instinct or by mere muscle memory, he was reaching for it..._  

“Is that a British Army Browning L9A1 in your pocket or are you just that pleased to see me?”The edges to Moriarty’s voice changed from ostentatively bored to teasingly hopeful throughout the sentence, and if there was a hint of nervousness behind it all, even John wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. 

Whatever thing Sherlock’s fingertips have been brushing, they abandoned it instantly. The strange expression fell off his face and his posture straightened, as he pulled his hand out of the pocket, fingers wrapped firmly around the gun. John swore inwardly. 

Jim Moriarty, almost unrecognisable to Sherlock at first in his sharp outfit, sauntered closer and stopped just behind John. Leaning in, he whispered to his ear: “Oh, it’s so not going to be that easy, Johnny,” his eyes fixed on Sherlock. 

“That’s some really bad taste of a getting-to-know-you present,” Jim eyed the gun with a reproachful scowl on his over-expressive face. 

“I’d figured out that you’d be more interested in the presenter,” Sherlock replied calmly. Jim grinned for both of them. 

“That’s what it all was about, wasn’t it?” Sherlock brought up his other hand to support the one holding the gun. “All those little puzzles... you liked to watch me dance.” 

Moriarty put his hands in his pockets and looked vaguely around, completely at ease despite the gun aimed straight in his face. 

“I’ve given you a glimpse, just a teensy glimpse of what I’ve got going on out there in the big bad world... I’ve shown you what I can do. I cut loose all those people, all those little problems, even thirty million quid just to get you to come to me.” 

“Why?” 

“Seriously, you’re asking me _that_?” Moriarty snorted. “Don’t you ever get bored?” 

“People have died,” Sherlock said quietly. His gaze momentarily slipped off Moriarty and flicked to John, an unspoken question of _Are you all right?_ John nodded briefly. 

“Not nearly enough of them,” Moriarty snarled, his personality changing suddenly into savage. John nearly jumped. He was already used to the Navigator’s volatile nature but the unexpected changes still startled him. 

“You see, the flirting’s over. Daddy’s had enough! You’ve got close to me, both of you.” Moriarty spared a sidelong glance at John. “You can’t be allowed to continue. The stars won’t be shining on your joined paths for long, so to speak.” 

John frowned. A very tiny light bulb began to flicker diffidently somewhere in the back of his mind. _Why am I the one strapped to the bomb and Sherlock the one who’s about to be taken down by a sniper when it would be so much easier just to kidnap and shoot us both? Moriarty wants Sherlock dead, yes, and he has enough reason to want me dead too, he threatened me enough times with it, in fact he bragged about it rather a lot..._  

The stars. The stars reflecting the mind of the Dreamer, better than a signature. No constellations on the skies for Sherlock who didn’t care about astronomy... and a whole _Argo Navis_ on the southern horizon, the Sails, the Keel and the Stern, such as they would never be visible from the latitude of London – but as _John remembered observing them in the winter time last year, when he was hiding in Cairo._  

John leapt forward and slammed himself up against Moriarty’s back, wrapping his arms tightly around the man. 

“Run! He won’t kill me!” He glared at Sherlock who made no move. Jim laughed in apparent delight. 

“Good! Very good. You figured it out, yeah?” Jim turned his head with some difficulty in the confines of John’s chokehold to whisper in his ear: “Now, what, _exactly_ , you’re going to do with it? He’s _sooo_ going to believe you.” 

“Sherlock, listen to me.” John paid no attention to Moriarty’s pathetic attempts to writhe himself out of his hold. “You need to run. I’ll be safe. He won’t kill me, I promise.” 

Sherlock only shook his head, clearly determined not to accept any form of selfless sacrifice on John’s part. “John. This really isn’t the best time to show me that heroes do exist.” Then he narrowed his eyes on him. The gunpoint wavered slightly. “Either that or... you’re _with him_ in this, after all. Are you, John?” 

Moriarty’s ecstatic beam could have eclipsed the sun. 

“Are you, John?” he parroted. “But I’m afraid, you rather showed your hand there, Johnny.” 

Another red dot began to dance directly over Sherlock’s forehead, implying that there was yet another sniper, on the opposite side of the pool than the first one. John swore under his breath and let go, taking one wary step back. 

“I’m not with him,” he said quietly, “he simply can’t kill me because I’m the Dreamer. This is _my_ dream and if I’d–” 

It was a ridiculous attempt and John could hear Moriarty snigger well before Sherlock rolled his eyes, interrupting him exactly like he did after John shot the cabbie: “Stop babbling, John. This isn’t time for PTSD either.” 

“Isn’t he sweet?” Moriarty asked nobody in particular, straightening the lapels of his suit jacket. He turned and gave John a dazzling smile. _Still haven’t figured out his totem, have you?–_ his eyes, shifty in all shades of black, seemed to say – _well, good luck with that._

“You may take that off, by the way,” he said aloud, pointing to the Semtex vest. “Getting blown to bits is such a messy way to go. My darlings have you on their sights anyway. I’m sure you look smashing with a crosshair across your brave, brave heart.” 

Then he turned back to Sherlock, all smile gone. 

“That’s the deal, Sherlock Holmes. Back off. Stop prying.” 

Sherlock held his tongue in check before John wrestled himself out of the vest, throwing it as far along the pool edge as he could. He was pretty sure that Moriarty didn’t plan on letting them go, not really – _there couldn’t be much time left –_ but the damned thing was heavy and he needed to breathe. Moriarty watched it with a mockery of patience. 

“You know I won’t,” Sherlock said at last. Moriarty shrugged exaggeratedly, walking at a leisurely pace alongside the ledge. Then he stopped and nodded briefly to himself, as if changing his mind. He turned around and this time, his smile was predatory, lips curled back from bared teeth, eyes spilling over with oily blackness. “You’re right,” he said. 

Something cracked under the roof of the pool, an almost imperceptible sound. John heard it nonetheless, his Extractor training has made him especially sensitive to such noises – the sounds of the dream weakening, shattering, on the verge of collapsing. The water surface rippled, small waves running over it with no apparent cause, as if stirred by a small earthquake. John could almost hear the wretched cabbie _somewhere around them_ draw in his last breath. 

“Say goodbye to your pet, Sherlock Holmes.” 

The red dot fixed on Sherlock’s forehead, John could see the minuscule up-and-down movement of it as the laser sight heaved in sync with the invisible sniper’s breathing. When it stilled, he lunged forward, barreling them both into the pool. 

He didn’t hear the shot. The pain searing through the side of his head told him all too clearly that there’s been one, and who it hit, before he blacked out. 

He came to his senses only a couple of seconds later, shocked by the impact of cold water _everywhere_ , lost to every sense of direction, head spinning and throbbing with pain. He gasped and gulped in a mouthful of water before he remembered that he’s _under_ the water, spitting and coughing it back out, chlorine scratching on the back of his nose. There was red, everything was red before his eyes – _the graze wound on my skull is bleeding and colouring the water_ – and somewhere in that red he caught a glimpse of a black shape, a body, struggling for the surface, legs kicking, _Sherlock, he’s still alive–_

Then it all came back to him in a flash. _I’m the Dreamer. When I die, this dream would collapse instantly and we all would wake up._  

He stopped his frantic attempts at swimming, opened his mouth and very consciously breathed in a lungful of water. 

It hurt. His body shuddered in a spasm, muscles cramping. He fought his reflexes to cough and vomit, to go up and breathe air, to escape this agony. Distantly, he felt a pair of hands grabbing him by the collar and dragging him up. He wanted to shout, _No, Sherlock, let me be_ , but he didn’t have much strength left, his head hurt and his lungs were exploding and he only wished he could drown faster– 

–when he felt the pull of the next dream level opening before him, time stopping and the world rotating in countermovement to the spinning of his own head.

 

On the night sky, the ship of the _Argonauts_ slowly sank under the horizon.

 

 


	5. Ricochet

John’s knees buckled and he found himself sliding to the floor, arms flailing in a weak attempt at regaining balance. He felt a strange pressure along his back – the hard edge of a cubicle and cold, wet tiles of the floor under his bum. He opened his eyes.  
  
The air, though laden with chlorine and a faint echo of mildew, felt like honey. John gulped in large gasps, trying to ignore the phantom cramps of his lungs. Seconds ago, he was shot in the head and drowning; now he was safe, sound, and thoroughly disoriented, crouching down against one of the cubicles. His clothes were mostly dry save for his shirt that was drenched with sweat. The only palpable wound on the throbbing left side of his head was the bruise from when he was pistol-whipped earlier in the park.    
  
His eyes stopped welling up with tears upon every intake of breath, the cramps in his chest and sides eventually subsided. His vision slowly cleared. John looked around to find Sherlock pacing frantically alongside the pool, mumbling something under his breath and scratching the back of his head with a loaded gun  _for God’s sake,_ “Sherlock! Stop doing that!”  
  
“What?” Sherlock’s eyes snapped back to awareness from his agitated frenzy, his expression was bewildered and disoriented, as well as John’s. “Oh, that.” He looked at the gun as if realizing for the first time that he was holding it.   
  
“What–what happened?” John couldn’t recall anything past his obviously failed attempt at drowning. For some reason, the Navigator could implant false memories only to Sherlock. “I probably blacked out or something, went on autopilot. Where’s everyone, hmm?” John pointed to the lack of the red dots dancing over their bodies.   
  
“Well, you threw yourself on Moriarty–” Sherlock began to summarise. Then he stopped abruptly, looking at John with eyes wide and unsure – as if he only then realised what John did. Something of an emotion passed over his face and that left him looking even more baffled.   
  
“Actually, that was...good, the thing. I mean...it was good what you did there,” Sherlock scrambled lamely. Sentiment clearly wasn’t his area. He cleared his throat and resumed: “There were of course more snipers, then Moriarty warned me to back off or he ‘would burn the heart out of me’ – never took him for the poetic type – and then he got a phone call and left.”  
  
 _Wait, what?_  John would scream at the absurdity of it and the stubbornness with which Sherlock refused to see it, if his throat wouldn’t still be sore from the drowning  _that didn’t happen._  
  
“Just like that?” He forced his voice to calmness. “A criminal mastermind invites you out, swarms the place with snipers, practices some bomb-strapping on your flatmate, and then instead of shooting the bloody brains out of that thick skull of yours he gives you friendly warning and leaves? How  _logical_  is that?”  
  
Sherlock lifted his hand absentmindedly to scratch at the back of his head again, then he remembered himself and tucked the gun back into his pocket. He offered a hand to John to help him get up.  
  
“Moriarty is clearly unhinged. You can’t apply logic to him. And he likes dramatics.”  
  
 _How long does it take to drown?_  John was a medical man and a soldier, well trained and in a good physical state. He could fight his body reflexes that tried to expel the water from his lungs and make him swim for his life, but he couldn’t do a thing about the speed of the brain’s reaction considering the lack of oxygen. He suspected he had good ten, perhaps even twenty, seconds before he would lose consciousness; three to four minutes for the cerebral activity to stop completely. The brain can live longer than the body – guillotined people have been reported to move their eye balls and blink several times after decapitation – but not for long.   
  
Obviously, it was long enough to buy Moriarty another dream level and some more time. Taking into account that time flow slowed by several orders of magnitude for every deeper level, this could yield another couple of days. Weeks even, if John couldn’t drown fast enough.   
  


***

  
  
“To be honest, you surprised me.”  
  
Moriarty lifted his cup of coffee to his lips and took a careful sip. The person opposite him leaned their short frame more comfortably in the lounge chair. The weak afternoon sun filtered through the tinted cafeteria window and made the plain blonde hair look almost gold.   
  
“It would seem that we have a common interest, you and I.”  
  
“Definitely,” Moriarty chewed on the candy that came with the coffee, pushing it against his cheek. He found the reaction to his table manners of a schoolboy mildly amusing.   
  
“Just that I don’t know what intentions  _you_  have with him. I say, he’s been fun and all that, and really useful Dreamer for the time being, but now he’s – he’s just got to go. If you get me.”  
  
“I get you all right,” his conversation partner nodded and clarified: “I want him dead, too.”   
  
“Gor Blimey!” Moriarty made a show of spitting out the black liquid he was pretending to enjoy. “I would never have thought you so... forward. I’d think you’d keep some decency, observe the proprieties and such.”  
  
“That’s the one thing you learn in military,” an explanation was delivered in a pleasant but dispassionate tone. “Diplomacy is a waste of time.”  
  
“Oh yes. I forgot about your background. My fault.”  
  
Moriarty watched the sugar cubes plopping into the otherwise untouched cup on the opposite side of the table. The silver clinking of the spoon against the cup was his only reply.   
  
“Not that I wouldn’t love to put your abilities into some proper use – but why now? All of a sudden, after all you’ve been through, you side with me. Is there no value to loyalty these days?”  
  
Moriarty caught the yearning looks the barista was throwing every now and then to his conversational partner. Was it the fluffy cuteness of being short, blonde, and grinning like loon on anyone who smiled their way? Moriarty wondered.  
  
“You don’t trust me. You don’t believe that I want him to go straight down to the Limbo and that I want to see to that.”  
  
“Well, who would trust you? My dear, you’re supposed to be at his side, to support him and all that rubbish.”  
  
Another short shrug and immediate, almost unconscious, straightening of the shirt.  _Military indeed._  
  
“You’ve met him. How many friends do you think he has?”  
  
“Dear me, is he really that insufferable? Enough for you to offer to shoot him for me?” Moriarty liked things fair and square, when it came down to business. He earned himself a soft smile on the slightly tanned face.  
  
“Brilliant deduction.”  
  
“Nah, don’t make impressions of him in front of me.” Moriarty made a horrified face. “My stomach’s been a bit weak lately.”  
  
“The only thing I ask in return is that it would be I who’d do it. You wouldn’t get to him before me.”  
  
Moriarty wrinkled his nose. “How do I know you’re any good? You already missed once.” He tapped the left side of his chest pointedly. “Didn’t it spoil your track record? Someone of such reputation...”  
  
His soon-to-be collaborator’s voice remained calm. “That was a miscalculation. I didn’t know who the Dreamer was at the time. Though I am aware that if I were more careful that time, this entire mess could have been avoided.”  
  
Moriarty winced. “C’mon. Where would be the fun?”  
  
Fun clearly wasn’t a concept much appreciated on the other side of the table right now. “So, are we agreed?”  
  
“Yeah.” He paused. “You know, I remember your father. He worked for me a couple of times, out there in the big real world.”  
  
“Did he?” Mary Moran–Watson stood up from her chair and smiled. “Well, I hope I’ll stand up to the tradition. Do we have a deal?”  
  
“All right. You take down John Watson. But you’ll do it on my mark.”  
  
“Fair enough.”  
  


***

  
The very next day after the pool, the ‘Fake detective’ press and media campaign started.  
  
The face of Richard Brook, whom John knew as the Navigator, and Sherlock as one Jim Moriarty, smiled on them with wide innocent eyes from every screen, spilt his lies from every newspaper page. The world of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, started to crumble.  
  
John wasn’t sure what the main purpose of this newest madness was. Everything the Navigator came up with so far was intended to simply kill Sherlock – to put a poisoned pill in his mouth, to drive a bullet through his forehead. To disgrace him wouldn’t have such effect – Sherlock certainly wasn’t suicidal. Nobody with  _mania de grandeur_  is.  
  
Sherlock didn’t care what other people thought of him.  
  
Or, perhaps, that wasn’t strictly true.   
  
“Can’t you  _see_  what’s going on?!” Sherlock raged, challenging John to doubt him too.  
  
Of course John could see that. He saw it all too well. The one true point of this entire ‘Rich Brook’ affair was a message from Moriarty to John:  _You can’t undo what I have done._  
  
The irony was biting. More than once, John has tried to convince Sherlock that his life wasn’t real. Now, Moriarty, the very creator of this deception, treated it like a child who builds a tower out of blocks only to hurl it around a moment later, taking a vicious glee out of the destruction. He was exposing Sherlock as a fake, denouncing his career, deconstructing his Work, compromising his identity – and Sherlock? He held onto it steadfastly with all his heart, hanging on the illusion and fighting to keep it, blind to the reality, unaware of the betrayal.  
  
John  _knew_  that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t real and yet that he, somehow, was  _for real_. He didn’t know the Extractor before but he grew to like the Detective. Often he wondered what would it be like to _live_  this, instead of dreaming it, to fight crime and irritate the police and–  
  
–to have a friend.  
  
Extractors didn’t have friends. Get too close and people could bring in uncontrollable personifications; the associated sentiments could produce Shadows. Caring wasn’t an advantage, attachment was a plain mistake. John knew that first hand.  
  
Once they wake, Sherlock would disappear from his life. Most likely, he wouldn’t even remember John. Targets rarely remembered their dreams, that was the point of mind heist. Such was the deal John made with the elder Holmes: bring Sherlock back, accept the new identity, clear as a forest spring and much safer than anything John would able to secure for himself, and move on with his life. Further away from mind heists, closer still to normality.  
  
 _Christ, the Sherlock I know would laugh at me for wanting to be normal. I wonder, how would the real Sherlock see me?_  
  
 _If_  they would wake. John was no closer to a successful inception than on the previous two occasions. Sherlock was awfully touchy about his things. John suspected that it was Sherlock’s subconscious being on guard – he was trying to protect his totem even without knowing why or what that was. So far, John could only ruled out Sherlock’s phone – the git sometimes obviously deemed his own thumbs too important for the case and made John send his texts for him. But the rest of the things in his pockets rarely left Sherlock’s inseparable coat...  
  
...which was now hanging on the rack in the lab corner, and Sherlock was nowhere in sight.   
  


***

  
John stormed out of the lab in search of the detective. There wasn’t anything more reasonable he could do when the bastard wasn’t answering his texts.

“Have you seen Sherlock?” He nearly tripped over the little mouse-y morgue assistant, not even waiting for the end of her stammered reply. Where could the man be? Did he go back home? No, his keys were in his coat pocket.... he might have forgotten, he was genius enough.

The ceiling cracked.  _There is no time to go back to Baker Street. He’ll be somewhere near._

The signal inside of Bart’s was barely one bar. John ran out and paced up and down the corridor while he dismissed one option after another.

– _Any idea where Sherlock is? JW_  
 _–Nope. I still need his statements from yesterday. Any more trouble? GL_

“John, hey!” The morgue girl peeked through the swing door on the far end of the corridor. “I’ve seen him just now – stopped by the lab and then he went for the emergency staircase. I tried to tell him you’ve been–”

“Thank you, Molls,” John didn’t even slow down as he ran past her, but he flashed her a quick smile, at least.

Why the stairs? The lifts were in perfect order. Then John felt another shiver of the ground.  _It’s collapsing, not much time left._  Was Sherlock afraid of an earthquake? That would be the first thing ever that would make him to take the non-lazy tour, John mused as he ran down the steps. Soon he was out on the street, looking up and down, searching amongst the passers-by for the unmistakable black curls. He couldn’t be so late...

His phone rang.

 

 

***

  
The daylight on the hospital roof was almost blinding for eyes that were still adjusted to the artificial light of the lab. Sun shone warmly and there was a high gale in the sky, herding solitary tufts of white clouds. Sherlock blinked several times to make out the dark figure waiting for him on the roof ledge, stark against the background like a shape cut out of a poster with a razor-sharp blade.

“What a nice day to die,” Rich Brook greeted him happily.

“Why?” Sherlock paced around him, hands clasped behind his back. “I can still prove that you created an entirely false identity.”

“It’s a lot less effort to just kill yourself,” Brook told him. Then he sighed exasperatedly. “Okay. You wouldn’t jump just for me, I can see that. So let me give you a little extra incentive. Your friend dies if you don’t.”

Sherlock’s distracted pacing faltered. Rich Brook beamed on him.

“Yes, little Johnny-boy. I’ve got a sniper on him. Off you pop, and he’s safe.”

Sherlock walked to the edge of the roof. When he leaned forward, he could see the ground below.  Bart’s had four storeys, it was and old, high-ceiled building. The people looked like tin soldiers down on the streets...  _John._  


**

  
“Sherlock? You okay?” Something terrible must have been happening, John thought; the man never made a call if he could text.

“Look up. I’m on the rooftop.”

John’s heart skipped a beat. “What’s going on?”

Sherlock’s voice sounded so...strange on the line. Almost choked. “An apology. It’s all true. Everything they said about me. I’m a fake. The newspapers were right–”

“Is he there?” John cut Sherlock’s speech short. He didn’t care he was all but yelling into the phone, the people passing him stopping and staring. There was no danger of alerting anyone now.

“Is he there with you? Don’t answer. I bet he is. He’s been talking you into suicide, hasn’t he? Telling you that’s better to jump than to live in disgrace?”

“More than that,” Sherlock told him carefully. Moriarty, as close as he was, could hear only Sherlock’s part of conversation – and he immediately drew the wrong conclusion. “Of course you’re more than a pet, little Johnny-boy” John heard Moriarty’s bored murmur in the background.

“No, no, no. Sherlock, you’re not a fake.” John swallowed. Never before has it occurred to him that mere words could hurt so much. “It’s me. I am a fake. I’ve got no sister, I’ve never been to Afghanistan.”

“John, what–”

“Listen to me. Just this once. Can you get anywhere he won’t be seeing what you’re doing with your hands?” The phone was hot and burning where it was pressed against John’s ear.

Such urgency was in John’s voice that Sherlock obeyed instantly. “Would you give me a moment? A moment of privacy? Please.” John’s heart sank when he heard Sherlock  _begging_  the man whom he despised, but he couldn’t risk his only, last chance. “Boring!” he heard Moriarty’s announcement through the phone, now from greater distance.

“Take a look on your magnifying glass.” John paused, and then swore when he saw that the figure of his bewildered friend on the rooftop didn’t move in the slightest.

“Just do it, alright? Don’t tell me anything, just look at it and listen to me.  _It’s a toy_ , Sherlock. It’s not a real magnifier. Look at it, carefully. Can’t you see there’s no lens? It’s a piece of sheet glass. You can be ignorant in physics as you like, but even you must know that sheet glass couldn’t work like that? It’s your totem.”

Sherlock froze, breath caught. Something began to unfold in the recesses of his memory.

“You’re expecting that a magnifier would magnify, and in a dream, it works. But in reality, it’s impossible.”

 

 

**

  
Sherlock checked the magnifier against his own thumb. He observed the lines of his fingerprints, now brought into detail. When he swiped the pad of his finger against the glass, he could feel the plane. How could it be that he never noticed that before? No convex surface of a lens, just plain sheet glass. His mind still couldn’t take the jump, it was still desperately trying to hold on the dream it’s been living for so long, but somewhere deep inside him, the foundations of that dream were already shattering.  _If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth..._

“I found out about it only a half an hour ago,” John added, sounding almost apologetically.

“So you’ve been looking for it.” Even shocked and overflowing with returned memories, Sherlock was fast in his thinking.

“Yeah. That was my job. Get to you and get you out of this. I’m an Extractor, just like you.”

_My entire life is a lie. I never solved a crime; in fact, I rather committed some. And that man down there on the pavement, that’s not an ordinary man broken by war who I fixed and made unique, it’s a hired professional heisting into my mind._

Sherlock was shaking, whether with laughter or with tears he couldn’t tell.

“I thought... _for real_... that you were my friend.”

John sounded so distant in the line, no more than a little tin soldier on the street: “It’s just a dream, Sherlock. You have to wake up.”

Moriarty in the distance laughed mockingly “Oh, that’s pathetic. Did he just declare his unending love to you? Pets can get so sentimental.”

“Yes, he did,” Sherlock replied absentmindedly. With a cold, detached interest he watched Sherlock the Detective, a man who was willing to die for his friend, fade and dissipate as it gave way to Sherlock the Extractor, a man of perfectly clear priorities. He drew a deep breath. His hand on the phone slacked. He turned around and tossed it onto the rooftop.

“He told me  _exactly_ what he was to me.” Face set in stone; he stepped off the ledge and walked back towards Moriarty.

 

 

**

  
John pocketed his phone. His job was done, Sherlock knew he was dreaming and he would find the way out of here. He lifted his gaze upwards once more, scanning the rooftops and high storey windows for the faint gleam of a telescope sight. Two years ago, he did just the same, and that time, he made a mistake, he overlooked one point, one possible line of fire, just one... that day, Mary got hit with the bullet that was meant for John.

Since that day, John’s been waiting for the bullet to ricochet. He bowed his head and stood still, waiting for the hit. 

 

 

**

  
On the roof, two enemies stared at each other, faces mere inches apart.

“Ooo-ooh, Sherlock.” Moriarty tutted. “I’m not bluffing. He’ll die, if you don’t.”

“I’m not on the side of the angels, Jim.”

Moriarty reached for his phone, face contorted in anger, and said quickly: “Finish him, sweetheart.”

Down on the street, the body of John Watson slumped to the ground. Sherlock heard the shot and refused to turn his head to spare a look.  _Not my business. Not my friend._

He circled his prey instead.

“I give you full marks on irony. All the time you were feeding the newspapers with the story of how I invented you, while the truth is that  _you invented me._ ”

Moriarty began to clap his hands. “Magnificent. Brilliant. Fantastic.” He assumed his best John impression, forging a warm grey-blue colour into his eyes. “Of course,  _that’s_ what he told you. Made you see the truth, heh? Pity he signed his death-warrant with it as well.”

“I’d rather discuss our little problem.” The shade of blue was all wrong. Sherlock could see with his inner eye how John’s eyes would look like now, gazing back at him from blue emptiness, reflecting the bright colour of the sky. He pushed that thought down.

“Our final problem,” Moriarty smiled. “This is the part where you tell me that you’d shake hands with me in hell to get the code that opens every door? I hate to disappoint you, but there is no key.”

Sherlock merely snorted. “I knew that from the start. Any idiot would know that a couple of lines of computer code couldn’t crash the world around our ears. Of course, my brother swallowed it hook, line and sinker. He  _begged_ me to extract it from you.”

Moriarty whipped around to stare at him.

“So, why did I accept? I simply wanted to get to know you. See for myself what all the rumours were about.” Sherlock’s mouth quirked upwards. “In the end, you were easy. I’m disappointed in you, _ordinary_  Jim Moriarty.”

“Wrong!” Moriarty yelled. “You would never get out! You’d never made it, if the little Johnny _fucking_  Watson hadn’t sniffed out your totem!”

The black was welling back into his eyes, glinting with rage. “Do you know how persistent the idiot was? He tried to kill me, and when it didn’t work quickly enough, he took a bullet for you and drowned himself in the pool to wake up us all! Always chasing your coat tails, always spoiling our beautiful game – oh, I’m  _so chuffed_  that you finally got rid of him! If I knew he meant so little to you I’d have him out of our way ages ago!”

Then he laughed a cruel, high-pitched sound. “But it’s nice to see that you’re no better than me. In fact, you’re worse than I expected. The little soldier would do anything for you and hey, there he lies, walking the meadows of the Limbo...used and thrown away.”

Sherlock took few steps backwards, as if involuntarily flinching from the tirade his gloating enemy was shouting in his face. Moriarty followed him closely, enjoying the stricken look on Sherlock’s face. Close to the ledge once again, Sherlock looked briefly down where John had stood earlier. A fair number of onlookers gathered there but he still could catch a glimpse of John’s unmoving body, the blood pooling under his head. First drops of rain began to mingle with the darkening red.

He looked up to the sky. Grey clouds were rising from all directions, quickly swallowing the blue of the bright afternoon. The drizzle was lukewarm like fresh blood, wind lashed in ragged blasts like the breath of a dying man.  _Abrupt weather changes: signs of a dream on the verge of collapsing._

He turned back to Moriarty with a wide grin.

“There’s only one solution to our problem,” he said and grabbed Moriarty by the arms, pulling him close to himself as he took the last step over the roof ledge.

For a couple of seconds, falling felt just like flying. He heard the crack of Moriarty’s skull on the pavement before his own vision was overflowed by red.

 

 

*

  
In the pool, the struggling body of John Watson shuddered one last time and went limp.

 

 

*

 

  
On the classroom floor, the cabbie spat out blood and his eyes rolled back in his head, the word _Moriarty_  half-formed on the motionless lips.

 

 

*

  
Sherlock Holmes opened his eyes.

“About time, brother.”


	6. Your ghost again

_Sherlock Holmes opened his eyes._

“About time, brother.” 

Mycroft came over to the bed when Sherlock awoke. Even though he knew it would betray the actual level of his concern, he leaned slightly towards him, the rest of his worries hidden behind his usual mask of indifference. 

Sherlock sat up, grimacing at the stiffness of his joints, and scowled at the IV lock on his arm.   “How long?” 

“About one hundred and twenty–two hours,” Mycroft said, checking his pocket watch. 

Sherlock murmured something inaudible, searched the bedside cabinet for a sticking plaster and then pulled the lock out, wincing with disgust. Then he got up, far too quickly for Mycroft’s liking. Still on wobbly legs, he made it for the closet where his coat hung and rummaged through its pockets. When he fished out the magnifying glass and checked it against his palm, Mycroft let out a soft “Ah.” 

Sherlock spun around and glared at the smug expression of his brother’s face. “Not your business.” 

“Well, I _am_ your brother after all,” Mycroft said innocently. 

“What do you remember?” he then asked, aware of the common phenomenon that the longer the dreams were, the less was retained from them after waking. Sherlock massaged his neck with both his hands and rolled his shoulders. “Not much,” he admitted reluctantly and disappeared into the adjoining bathroom. His next words were half muffled by the sound of the shower running. “It’s all a bit of a blur. I suppose our target made the dream as unfathomable as possible.” 

“What about the code?” Mycroft raised his voice. He was sure Sherlock has heard him but his brother was obviously taking his time with the shower. At last, the sound of water stopped and Sherlock emerged from the bathroom, buttoning up a new shirt. 

“There’s no code,” he laughed. “Really, brother, I thought you above the level of idiocy required to fall for such a ploy.” 

“Then it was– what, a trap?” Mycroft narrowed his eyes at the air of unabashed glee surrounding his brother. “You knew who Moriarty was – of course. Why did you–” 

“You wouldn’t let me experiment on the Navigator if you knew what he could –supposedly– do,” Sherlock pointed out. Mycroft nodded sternly. “Of course. I would never expose you to such a threat.” 

Sherlock stopped half-way through an amused snort when he noticed a curtain drawn over the half of the room. He pushed it aside, revealing another bed. The Extractor lying there was in a state of deep coma, his right hand thrown over his chest and clutching just under left shoulder, fingers flexed even in sleep. Sherlock frowned. “Who’s that? Did you send another Extractor after me?” 

“Of course I did. You were in for days.” 

“That was foolish of you,” Sherlock said with his usual disdain. “When you evaluated the situation as potentially dangerous, you certainly weren’t supposed to imperil outsiders.” 

“Forgive me for holding your life dearer than the life of some mediocre Extractor,” Mycroft said, sounding, perhaps, more bitter than he intended to. Sherlock refrained from commenting on that, focusing on the sleeper instead. 

“He didn’t make it, I see.” Sherlock checked the EEG readings. “Was that one of yours?” 

“Don’t bother about him. He’s nobody,” Mycroft said dismissively, drawing the curtain back. To his relief, Sherlock nodded, mind clearly elsewhere, perhaps already elaborating the details of his next experiment. He got hold of his phone and began to scroll through missed calls and unread messages. He didn’t even look back as he walked out of the room. 

Mycroft waited for the door to click shut. From the corridor, he could briefly hear the waning echo of Sherlock’s voice, murmuring something about a lack of signal in this damned underground building, and then it trailed off and Sherlock was gone. 

“Thank you, Mr. Watson.” Mycroft allowed himself one sad smile. “I’m glad I wasn’t mistaken choosing you.” The body didn’t stir, the face of the sleeping man didn’t move. Mycroft reached for the call button to summon the medical staff.  A physician was required to administer the lethal dose of barbiturates and to fill out the death certificate. The mind was already lost, no need to maintain the body. 

The door banged open. Sherlock stood in the doorway, the knuckles of his fingers white where he clutched his phone. He stared at Mycroft with wide eyes. 

“You meant it literally. When you said he was nobody.” Sherlock strolled closer.  

“John Watson alias _Nobody_ , sixteen illegal heists, secretly married to his team member, Shadowed after her death, Interpol top five after the Scott case...” he muttered rapidly, nearly stumbling over his words. 

Sherlock looked at his phone as if seeing it for the first time, then back at the sleeper. “My phone had no signal...” he said under his breath. His eyes drank in the lines of Watson’s face. “I remember him.” 

Mycroft sighed. He would have preferred not to get his brother involved with the unpleasant part of this. “When I suspected that you were unable to tell dream from reality, I hired him. He was supposed to remind you of your totem.” 

“To get close to me...” Sherlock whispered. His gaze was turned inwards; he was replaying the events of his dream. “I wouldn’t have got out if not for him. And then I... used him and threw him away.” He shivered. 

Mycroft was surprised when he heard an emotion in his brother’s voice and grew almost alarmed when he identified it: it was self-reproach.  

“Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?” 

Mycroft looked up. He really needed to sound firm for what he was about to say. “All lives end. Extractors don’t form attachments. You’ve said that to me many times. Alone protects you.” 

Sherlock shook his head. “Friends protect people.” His voice was small and almost surprised, as if he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the concept and yet he wasn’t able to deny the truth in it. 

“That doesn’t sound like you, brother.” 

There was softness in Sherlock’s eyes Mycroft was sure he never saw before. The words of John Watson from their first meeting, his warning against the Inception, rang in Mycroft’s ears: ‘You never know what will come out of it...’ An indefinite fear nagged at the back of his mind. _What exactly did John Watson incept in my brother’s head?_  

“Don’t,” Sherlock snapped when he saw Mycroft reaching to unplug and pack away the DreamShare unit. Warily, Mycroft pulled his hand back. With some tact and gentle approach, he could maneuver Sherlock out of this... 

“I’m sorry, Sherlock, but he’s lost. You know better than anyone–” 

 Sherlock stared him down. “I could bring him back.” 

Then he averted his gaze and added, a bit guiltily: “I experimented with deep levels. I found a drug that–” 

“An untested substance, for one thing, and this is not just a deep level, do you really think I would let you risk your life? Only to prove that you could, that you’re clever?” 

“He _saved_ my life,” Sherlock stressed out the word, but Mycroft was well prepared for this sort of argument. 

“Don’t make him into a hero. He was doing it for a generous reward!” 

“Well, he’s not going to enjoy his prize now, is he?” Sherlock spat out, sneering with more animosity that Mycroft ever thought he was able to provoke. 

“Stop wasting time, every minute matters now. With the time dilatation...”  Sherlock began programming a new heist on Watson’s unit. Mycroft watched it with growing desperation. 

“Why, Sherlock? Why risk your life for a complete stranger?” 

Sherlock gave him a ‘Do you hear yourself?’ look. “Ask _John_ when he wakes. Because that’s what he did for me.”

 

***

The gravel crunched beneath his feet as he climbed up the path cut into the cliffs. The chill of the early morning hour biting at the skin under his eyes as he flushed from the exercise. The cliffs faced westward and the little gravel beach beneath them must have been a lovely sun-bathing spot in the long summer afternoons. The beach, the rocky wall and the path zigzagging upwards were blanketed with bluish shadow, all colours hushed two shades to the blue from their natural brightness, all sounds sleepy and shivering with cold. 

When he reached the top, a disconnected but distinctly clear memory rose to the surface of his consciousness – the way the Reaper sharpens his scythe: with silk, with cobwebs, with streaming light of the rising sun. 

He could feel the caress of the light, flowing over the landscape in waves of pink and orange, the warmth still weak so early in the spring yet already promising, and he breathed in the air laden with warmth and a strong tang of salt. The sky was high and empty, and the opal grey on the horizon bled through countless shades of still stronger colour into the bright cerulean of the zenith. 

Sherlock Holmes turned up the collar of his coat and drew in a deep breath. His next steps followed the path toward a small, greyish-white cottage in the distance, snuggled to the green of the downs like a rabbit, sleeping in the grass. His long strides were eating up the good mile of the path quickly and soon the bottoms of his trouser legs were wet with the dew on the grass, where the shadow of the looming house prevented the sun from drinking it up. 

The building was ancient and solid, with walls of stone and a slate roof; broad dining room windows looked across the expanse of downs toward the sea. Everything was quiet here. Long stone wall led away from the southern side of the house; a couple of wayward cherry branches crawled over its top – the leaves yet sparse but the white blossoms in full bloom. Sherlock smiled when he saw a solitary bee, still drowsy with cold, making a sloppy line for the feast. 

A small gate let him into the garden, well-kept and ready for this season’s cultivation. The air was warmer here, the wall sheltering the place from the sea breeze, and just a bit tinged with the sweet fragrance of cherries. Another bee circled his head and disappeared into the trees. 

“Well, I’ll be damned,” a raspy voice from behind said, catching with a slight wheeze on every vowel, “never woulda thought of the bees.”  

Sherlock turned around to find an old man curled up in an even older chair propped against the garden wall to get the best of the morning sun, an enormous tartan quilt wrapped around him like a tortoise shell. Only a nearly bald head and a pair of wrinkled hands wrapped round a cuppa peeped out of the folds of the heavy fabric. One of the hands let go of the steaming mug to wave an errant bee farther off from the weak smell of tea.   

“Soddin’ bees. I hate’em.” The old man chewed on the words spitefully. “Never had’em. What are they doin’ here anyway?” He squinted at Sherlock as if he couldn’t see him properly. _He can’t_ , Sherlock realised; _with the sun behind my back and in his eyes all he sees is a dark silhouette outlined with sparks._

“They came with me,” he answered softly. They were his addition to this dream. 

“Nonsense,” the old man shook his head slowly from side to side. Sherlock watched his hands tighten their grip on the mug, tendons standing out sharply under the papery skin, joint cartilages bulky and stiff with age. “Ghosts don’t bring anythin’ in here.” 

“John.” Sherlock came closer, crouching down in front of the chair so that his face was level with the man’s eyes. He searched them for the signs of recognition. 

“I’d have those dreams,” John whispered, his gaze resting on some distant spot, unfocused. “It all made sense there. I’ve been an invalided Army doctor and I had the most ridiculous flatmate. We’ve been solving criminal cases together and...it all just clicked. I was happy.” 

He sighed and shoved one hand under the quilt to rub at his shoulder. “Then we met an Irish wanker who made him to jump off a building to save my life. He did it...and I was left alone. It all went kind of downhill from there. Well, he wasn’t scaring off my girlfriends anymore. I met Mary, married her and we moved in here. And I was happy again. She died last year...” John looked around and frowned at Sherlock as if it surprised him to find him there. 

“I owed her this,” he said with painful force. “She deserved a life, she wanted a life with me... I had to dream it. I had to.” 

Sherlock took in the feel of the place, its ethereal beauty, the whitewashed nostalgia of it, and saw it for what it was: an atonement. John had spent years in the Limbo building a shrine to appease the Shadow of his own guilt. 

“Not the best of dreams, but a good one,” John added, after a while of silence filled with sadness. “Better than the ones with your ghost coming back and telling me it was all a fake.” 

Sherlock moved a bit closer, now he was within reach. “You know I’m no ghost, John. You could always tell, couldn’t you? The difference between the original and the reflection... between the voice and the echo. You could.” 

“Between a person and a personification, yeah,” John nodded, eyes half-closed. 

“Do I feel like a Shadow, John?” 

Sherlock waited for a reply so long that he almost started to worry that John has dozed off the way old people do, succumbing to the slumber mid-sentence. But no, John was still looking at him with a slight frown in the crinkles around the eyes full of washed-out blue. It was a look one could give a Rubik’s cube that has eluded all attempts at setting it straight for years. 

“No,” he said at last, slowly. Some of the firmness that was missing before found its way back into his voice. “If anything, I should think that I would be yours.” 

Sherlock covered the fingers wrapped around the mug with his hand; they felt like old currant roots, knotty and dry. “You would be,” he admitted, looking down. “If I didn’t come back, you would become my Shadow.” 

The fingers began to shake. Sherlock looked up to find John laughing; soundless, skittering bouts of breath escaping him and turning quickly into a fit of cough. 

“Yeah,” John managed at last, wiping the corners of his eyes, “and you would hate that. Not being able to _work_.” 

“That’s not why I came back _and you know it_ ,” Sherlock leaned forward, seeking John’s eyes and holding them with all the convincingness he could muster. They, somehow, became younger with every word. 

“Tell me, Sherlock,” John licked his lips with some difficulty, “what kind of a Shadow would I make? Would I be the guilt that you’ve sent a man to death?” 

The forced carelessness in his voice was too brittle not to break and Sherlock could hear the underlying anxiety, bubbling up through the cracks. John was waiting for an answer, and Sherlock could tell that the one John offered to him wasn’t the one he wanted to hear. The old Sherlock, the one before all this business with Moriarty, wasn’t a scrupulous man. An unpreventable death wouldn’t haunt him in the slightest... 

But he wasn’t the same man any longer. 

“No,” he said with certainty. “You would be the Shadow of my regret that I didn’t recognise I had a friend until it was too late.” 

John just sat there for a while, nodding to himself; short, repeated movements of his head. It wasn’t bald any more; and every second the grey in the hair was diminishing, giving way to sandy blond. His eyes roamed through the garden. Then he cleared his throat. 

“Well, your brother’s going to hate me for this.” 

Sherlock blinked and in the next second he burst in a fit of giggles, helpless not to join John’s unabashed laughter, genuine and strong and completely irresistible.  

“Right.” The situation where Mycroft would be shouting blue murder at John for compromising Sherlock’s career as a side effect to the saving of his life was actually rather disturbingly likely to happen. Sherlock sniggered once more and rose to his feet. The movement roused one of the bees that were crawling on the sun-warmed wall and John almost fell off his chair, hands flailing around his head, the now cold tea splashing all over Sherlock’s front and the mug landing in the grass with a muffled _thump_. 

“I _hate_ when they fly so near by my face!” John shouted and batted away the hands that came to steady him and help him to his feet. Not that Sherlock was of so much use as a support right then; nearly doubling over with laughter and attempting to wipe the tea from his coat at the same time. 

“Imagine I always wanted to keep bees when I retire.” Sherlock returned the scowl on John’s face with a beam of his own. “You know what they say? The bees don’t like smoke.” 

Sherlock dug deep in his pocket and took out an old pipe. “Here, John, have a smoke. It’s time to go.” 

John eyed the pipe mistrustfully. “This is how you got in here? I knew it wasn’t tobacco...” 

Sherlock nodded. “It’s a drug. You have it already in your system; I administered it intravenously before I went for the heist. But we need to convince your mind that you’ve taken it. Smoke, John. It will make you sleep. I’ll be there when you wake.” He struck a match and lit up the substance inside the pipe; the smell wasn’t entirely unpleasant. 

“You better be,” John mumbled, huffing out a cloud of smoke in the direction of the nearest bee, just in case. The drug was acting quickly and he leaned against the wall, head lolling to the side to rest on Sherlock’s shoulder. The last thing he registered was Sherlock extricating the pipe from his numb fingers, taking a deep drag for himself.

 

He didn’t see the slender figure of his dead wife stepping through the door into the garden; he was already asleep when she looked at him with a fond, fleeting smile before she locked eyes with Sherlock. 

“So, Mr. Holmes, have you come to snatch him from me again?” she asked lightly, as young as Sherlock remembered her, however vaguely. 

“He was never yours to keep,” he said. 

“That’s true,” she sighed. “And I am long gone, anyway. He just needed to let me go.” 

 She turned her face to the sun, eyes closed, already translucent as she faded away. “Take care of him.” 

 Sherlock tightened the hold of his arm around John where he supported him: “I will.” 

 

***

 

“You know, you could always become the consulting detective.” 

Sherlock looked up from his notes on the revised edition of the _Science of Extraction_. John stood in the doorway to the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. No sugar, no honey; his dislike of sweetness was consistent. 

“You think that anyone would take me seriously?” Sherlock snorted. It was true he didn’t go out for ‘field research’ anymore; stating that the Navigator was the biggest challenge there was and that nothing held quite the same appeal after that. 

Neither did John. The only dreams he entered these days were his own, at night-time, and somehow, they always led him to a small mound of earth under a cherry tree in a sunny garden. Sometimes, he brought flowers. His shoulder didn’t ache in those dreams; they were happy ones. 

John blinked back to reality and shrugged. “You could start with the Vermeer. You can prove now that it’s a fake. Although, how could anyone who knows you believe that you solved a case using your _knowledge of astronomy_ is beyond me...” John caught the pen thrown at him and grinned. 

“But who would listen to me?” Sherlock complained. 

“There is an officer named Lestrade at New Scotland Yard, actually,” John pointed out. “Your dream was accurate to the point. I don’t know if he’ll turn out to be the stoical sufferer he was in the dream but if you could at least try not to drive him round the bend all the time, I’m sure he’d let you on the cases.” 

“Mycroft _could_ pull some strings–” Sherlock was stopped half-sentence, as the pen took the return journey through the air. “Don’t you even think of asking your brother for another favour. We already owe him a huge one for clearing my record.” 

“But only if you’d investigate with me,” Sherlock stipulated. “I’d need, you know, the _outside perspective._ ” 

“All right, your Brilliance,” John laughed. “I know you’d be lost without your Shadow.”

 

 

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Deep Purple song "Child in Time"
> 
>  
> 
> __  
> Sweet child in time  
>  you'll see the line  
> line that's drawn between  
> good and bad
> 
>  
> 
> _See the blind man_  
>  he's shooting at the world  
> bullets flying  
> ah, taking toll (killing everyone)
> 
>  
> 
> _If you've been bad - Lord I bet you have_  
>  and you've not been hit  
> by the flying lead
> 
>  
> 
> _You better close your eyes_  
>  you better bow your head  
> and wait for the ricochet  
> 


End file.
